Harvard professor wins Nobel in chemistry
Martin Karplus, the Theodore William Richards Professor of Chemistry Emeritus at Harvard, is one of three winners of the 2013 Nobel Prize in chemistry, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced this morning. The 83-year-old Vienna-born theoretical chemist, who is also affiliated with the Université de Strasbourg, Strasbourg, France, is a 1951 graduate of Harvard College and earned his Ph.D. in 1953 at the California Institute of Technology. He shared the Nobel with researchers Michael Levitt of Stanford University and Arieh Warshel of the University of Southern California, Los Angeles. Warshel was once a postdoctoral student of Karplus, who had worked with both men during six months in Israel during the 1960s. All three were then at the Weizmann Institute of Science with chemist Shneior Lifson, but have not worked formally together since then. According to the Nobel website, the prize was awarded for the researchers’ work in “the development of multiscale models...