Citizenship American, Austrian Fields Electrical engineering Role Chemist | Name Martin Karplus | |
 | ||
Institutions Harvard UniversityUniversite de StrasbourgColumbia UniversityUniversity of Illinois Alma mater California Institute of TechnologyHarvard University Thesis A quantum-mechanical discussion of the bifluoride ion (1954) Books Atoms and Molecules: An Introduction for Students of Physical Chemistry Similar People Arieh Warshel, Michael Levitt, Benoit Roux, Linus Pauling | ||
Martin karplus discusses winning the nobel prize in chemistry
Martin Karplus (born March 15, 1930) is an Austrian-born American theoretical chemist. He is the Theodore William Richards Professor of Chemistry, emeritus at Harvard University. He is also Director of the Biophysical Chemistry Laboratory, a joint laboratory between the French National Center for Scientific Research and the University of Strasbourg, France. Karplus received the 2013 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, together with Michael Levitt and Arieh Warshel, for "the development of multiscale models for complex chemical systems".
Contents
- Martin karplus discusses winning the nobel prize in chemistry
- Martin karplus arieh warshel and michael levit comment on nobel prize for chemistry win
- Education and career
- Research
- Books
- Notable students and postdocs
- Awards and honours
- Personal life and biography
- References
Martin karplus arieh warshel and michael levit comment on nobel prize for chemistry win
Education and career
After earning an AB degree from Harvard College in 1950, Karplus pursued graduate studies at the California Institute of Technology. He completed his Ph.D. in 1953 under Nobel Laureate Linus Pauling. According to Pauling, Karplus "was [his] most brilliant student". He was an NSF Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Oxford (1953–55) where he worked with Charles Coulson. Karplus taught at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign (1955–60) and then Columbia University (1960–67) before moving to Harvard in 1967. He established a research group in Strasbourg, France, after two sabbatical visits between 1992 and 1995 in the NMR laboratory of Jean-François Lefèvre at Louis Pasteur University in Strasbourg.
Research
Karplus has contributed to many fields in physical chemistry, including chemical dynamics, quantum chemistry, and most notably, molecular dynamics simulations of biological macromolecules. He has also been influential in nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy, particularly to the understanding of nuclear spin-spin coupling and electron spin resonance spectroscopy. The Karplus equation describing the correlation between coupling constants and dihedral angles in proton nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy is named after him.
His current research is concerned primarily with the properties of molecules of biological interest. His group originated and currently coordinates the development of the CHARMM program for molecular dynamics simulations. He is a member of the International Academy of Quantum Molecular Science. He has supervised over 200 graduate students and postdoctoral researchers in his long career (since 1955) in the University of Illinois, Columbia University (1960 - 1967), and Harvard University. He is a recipient of the Christian B. Anfinsen Award, given in 2001.
Books
Notable students and postdocs
Karplus mentored the following students and postdoctoral researchers (in alphabetical order)
Awards and honours
Karplus was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 1967. He was awarded the Irving Langmuir Award in 1987. He became foreign member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1991 and was elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Society (ForMemRS) in 2000. He was awarded the Linus Pauling Award in 2004 and the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2013.
Personal life and biography
Karplus was a child when his family fled from the Nazi-occupation in Austria a few days after the Anschluss in March 1938, spending several months in Zürich, Switzerland and La Baule, France before immigrating to the United States. Prior to their immigration to the United States, the family was known for being "an intellectual and successful secular Jewish family" in Vienna. His grandfather, Johann Paul Karplus (1866-1936) was a highly acclaimed professor of psychiatry at the University of Vienna. He is nephew, by marriage, of the famous sociologist, philosopher and musicologist Theodor W. Adorno and grandnephew of the physicist Robert von Lieben. His brother, Robert Karplus, was an internationally recognized physicist and educator at University of California, Berkeley.