- 2013 Nobel Prize in Chemistry
Intro
Israeli American computational chemist, distinguished Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of Southern California. He received the 2013 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, together with Michael Levitt and Martin Karplus for "the development of multiscale models for complex chemical systems".
Education and Work Experience
1969, Ph. D., Weizmann Institute, Rehovot
1984-Present, Professor, University of Southern California, Los Angeles
1996-Present, Distinguished Professor of Chemistry, University of Southern California
Honors and Awards
2009, Member of the United States National Academy of Sciences
2013, The Nobel Prize for Chemistry
2014, Honorary Fellow (HonFRSC) of Royal Society of Chemistry
Major Academic Achievements
To accurately predict the course of the reactions at the sites where the reaction occurs advanced calculations based on quantum mechanics are required. For other parts
of the molecules, it is possible to use the less complicated calculations of classical mechanics. In the 1970s, Martin Karplus, Michael Levitt, and Arieh Warshel successfully developed methods that combined quantum and classical mechanics to calculate the courses of chemical reactions using computers. Arieh Warshel made major contributions in introducing computational methods for structure function correlation of biological molecules, pioneering and co-pioneering programs, methods and key concepts for detailed computational studies of functional properties of biological molecules using Cartesian-based force field programs, the combined Quantum Chemistry/Molecular mechanics method for simulating enzymatic reactions, the first molecular dynamics simulation of a biological process, microscopic electrostatic models for proteins, free energy perturbation in proteins and other key advances.