Michael Levitt

By Erik J. Larson, PhD

Levitt is Professor of Structural Biology at Stanford University. He is also known as a biophysicist. Levitt is widely recognized for his research in chemistry, winning the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2013 (along with colleagues Martin Karplus and Arieh Warshel). He initially studied mathematics and physics, earning his bachelor’s degree in Physics in King’s College London in 1967. He received his Ph.D. in Computational Biology at the University of Cambridge, England.

Levitt is known for being one of the first to develop “molecular dynamics” simulations of DNA and proteins using computation. He is currently working on developing predictive methods for macromolecular structures, known as macromolecular structure validation.

Levitt has served on the scientific advisory boards of numerous companies, including Dupont Merck Pharmaceuticals and 3D Pharmaceuticals. He was elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 2001. In 2002, he became a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and he received the DeLano Award for Computational Biosciences in 2014.

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