The Crystallographic Community

Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2013

Martin Karplus, Michael Levitt and Arieh Warshel

for the development of multiscale models for complex chemical systems

[M. Karplus]

Martin Karplus
Born 1930, Vienna, Austria

Karplus' family left Vienna in 1938 and moved to Boston, USA. Karplus was an undergraduate at Harvard College and moved to CalTech to carry out research for his doctorate in chemistry under Linus Pauling. In 1953, after being awarded his PhD, Karplus moved to Oxford, England, for a period of postdoctoral study. In 1955 he moved back to the US to work at Illinois University. In 1960 he moved to Columbia, initially to the Watson Scientific Laboratory, and then in 1963 he took up a professorial position in chemistry at Columbia University.

In 1966 Karplus moved back to Harvard and began to work on biology-related problems. In 1969 he spent a 6 month sabbatical at the Weizmann Institute where he met Arieh Warshel. In 1974 he moved part of his research group to Paris where he became a tenured professor. Eventually he moved back to Harvard.

He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a foreign member of the Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Royal Society of London. He is Professeur Conventionne, Universite de Strasbourg, France, and Theodore William Richards Professor of Chemistry, Emeritus, Harvard University, USA.

The information on this page is based on content at Nobelprize.org © The Nobel Foundation and Spinach on the ceiling: a theoretical chemist's return to biology, Annu. Rev. Biophys. Biomol. Struct. 2006, 35: 1-47.  Photo credit Harvard Public Affairs & Communications, Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer


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