Martin Karplus

Martin Karplus (born March 15, 1930, Vienna, Austria) is an American Austrian chemist who was awarded the 2013 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for developing accurate computer models of chemical reactions that were able to use features of both classical physics and quantum mechanics. He shared the prize with American-British-Israeli chemist Michael Levitt and American-Israeli chemist Arieh Warshel.

Karplus received a bachelor’s degree from Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1951 and a doctorate from the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena in 1953. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Oxford in England (1953–55) and a professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (1955–60) and at Columbia University in New York City (1960–65). He joined the chemistry faculty at Harvard in 1966, eventually becoming professor emeritus. In 1996 he also became a professor at the Louis Pasteur University (later incorporated into the University of Strasbourg) in France.

In 1970, while at Harvard, Karplus was joined by Warshel, who was a postdoctoral fellow. Karplus had already worked on computer programs that used quantum mechanics in modeling chemical reactions, whereas Warshel had extensive experience with computer modeling of molecules using classical physics. They wrote a program that modeled the atomic nuclei and some electrons of a molecule using classical physics and other electrons using quantum mechanics. Their technique was initially limited to molecules with mirror symmetry. However, Karplus was particularly interested in modeling retinal, a large complex molecule found in the eye and crucial to vision, which changes shape when exposed to light. In 1974 Karplus, Warshel, and collaborators published a paper that successfully modeled retinal’s change in shape.

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Karplus’s autobiography, Spinach on the Ceiling: The Multifaceted Life of a Theoretical Chemist, was published in 2020.