Martin Karplus

Martin Karplus (; March 15, 1930 – December 28, 2024) was an Austrian and American theoretical chemist. He was the Theodore William Richards Professor of Chemistry at Harvard University. He was also the 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".

Early life Martin Karplus was born on March 15, 1930, in Vienna, Austria. He 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. His grandfather, Johann Paul Karplus (1866–1936) was a highly acclaimed professor of psychiatry at the University of Vienna. His great-aunt, Eugenie Goldstern, was an ethnologist who was killed during the Holocaust. He was the nephew, by marriage, of the 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. Continuing with the academic family theme, his nephew, Andrew Karplus, is a biochemistry and biophysics professor at Oregon State University.

Education After earning a BA degree in Chemistry and Physics from Harvard College in 1951, Karplus pursued graduate studies at the California Institute of Technology. He completed his PhD 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)

Personal life and death Karplus was married to Marci

Research Karplus published his first academic paper when he was 17 years old.

From 1969 to 1970, Karplus visited the Structural Studies Division at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology.

In 1970 postdoctoral fellow Arieh Warshel joined Karplus at Harvard. Together they wrote a computer program that modeled the atomic nuclei and some electrons of a molecule using classical physics and modeling other electrons using quantum mechanics. In 1974 Karplus, Warshel and other collaborators published a paper based on this type of modeling, which successfully modeled the change in shape of retinal, a molecule important to vision.

Books

Notable students and postdocs Source:

Bernard R. Brooks (National Institutes of Health) Charles L. Brooks III (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor) Axel T. Brunger (Stanford University) J. Andrew McCammon (UCSD) (w/ Karplus and Gelin) published the first MD simulation of BPTI P. T. Narasimhan (University of Illinois) Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar laureate B. Montgomery Pettitt (University of Texas Medical Branch, Baylor College of Medicine, The Gulf Coast Consortia (GCC)) Benoît Roux (University of Chicago) Andrej Šali (University of California, San Francisco) Klaus Schulten (University of Illinois) Jeremy C. Smith (Oak Ridge National Laboratory) David J. States (The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston) Arieh Warshel (University of Southern California) (co-recipient of the 2013 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, along with Karplus and Michael Levitt (Stanford)) Eugene Shakhnovich, (Harvard University) Alexander D. MacKerell Jr. (University of Maryland, Baltimore) John Kuriyan (Vanderbilt University)

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 is a member of the International Academy of Quantum Molecular Science. 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 is a recipient of the Christian B. Anfinsen Award, given in 2001. He was awarded the Linus Pauling Award in 2004 and the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2013.