Martin Karplus

Martin Karplus was born into a prominent Viennese Jewish family that fled to the United States days after the 1938 Anschluss. At Harvard he pioneered ways to simulate chemical reactions on computers by combining quantum mechanics for the reacting atoms with simpler classical physics for their surroundings — 'multiscale' models. This approach let scientists watch how large molecules such as proteins move and react, and he shared the 2013 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Michael Levitt and Arieh Warshel.