Martin Karplus (born March 15, 1930) is an Austrian and American

theoretical chemist Theoretical chemistry is the branch of chemistry which develops theoretical generalizations that are part of the theoretical arsenal of modern chemistry: for example, the concepts of chemical bonding, chemical reaction, valence, the surface ...

. He is the Director of the

Biophysical Chemistry Biophysical chemistry is a physical science that uses the concepts of physics and physical chemistry for the study of biological systems. The most common feature of the research in this subject is to seek explanation of the various phenomena in ...

Laboratory, a joint laboratory between the

French National Center for Scientific Research The French National Centre for Scientific Research (french: link=no, Centre national de la recherche scientifique, CNRS) is the French state research organisation and is the largest fundamental science agency in Europe. In 2016, it employed 31,637 ...

and the

University of Strasbourg The University of Strasbourg (french: Université de Strasbourg, Unistra) is a public research university located in Strasbourg, Alsace, France, with over 52,000 students and 3,300 researchers. The French university traces its history to the ea ...

, France. He is also the Theodore William Richards Professor of

Chemistry Chemistry is the science, scientific study of the properties and behavior of matter. It is a natural science that covers the Chemical element, elements that make up matter to the chemical compound, compounds made of atoms, molecules and ions ...

, emeritus at

Harvard University Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of higher le ...

. Karplus received the 2013

Nobel Prize in Chemistry ) , image = Nobel Prize.png , alt = A golden medallion with an embossed image of a bearded man facing left in profile. To the left of the man is the text "ALFR•" then "NOBEL", and on the right, the text (smaller) "NAT•" then "M ...

, together with

Michael Levitt Michael Levitt, ( he, מיכאל לויט; born 9 May 1947) is a South African-born biophysicist and a professor of structural biology at Stanford University, a position he has held since 1987. Levitt received the 2013 Nobel Prize in Chemistr ...

and

Arieh Warshel Arieh Warshel ( he, אריה ורשל; born November 20, 1940) is an Israeli-American biochemist and biophysicist. He is a pioneer in computational studies on functional properties of biological molecules, Distinguished Professor of Chemistry ...

, for "the development of multiscale models for complex chemical systems".

Early life

Martin Karplus was born in Vienna, Austria. He was a child when his family fled from the

Nazi Nazism ( ; german: Nazismus), the common name in English for National Socialism (german: Nationalsozialismus, ), is the far-right totalitarian political ideology and practices associated with Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party (NSDAP) in ...

-occupation in Austria a few days after the

Anschluss The (, or , ), also known as the (, en, Annexation of Austria), was the annexation of the Federal State of Austria into the German Reich on 13 March 1938. The idea of an (a united Austria and Germany that would form a " Greater Germany ...

in March 1938, spending several months in Zürich, Switzerland and La Baule, France before immigrating to the United States. Prior to their immigration to the United States, the family was known for being "an intellectual and successful secular Jewish family" in Vienna. 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 is the nephew, by marriage, of the sociologist, philosopher and musicologist

Theodor W. Adorno Theodor W. Adorno ( , ; born Theodor Ludwig Wiesengrund; 11 September 1903 – 6 August 1969) was a German philosopher, sociologist, psychologist, musicologist, and composer. He was a leading member of the Frankfurt School of criti ...

and grandnephew of the physicist

Robert von Lieben Robert von Lieben (September 5, 1878, in Vienna – February 20, 1913, in Vienna) was an Austrian entrepreneur, and self-taught physicist and inventor. Lieben and his associates Eugen Reisz and Siegmund Strauss invented and produced a ga ...

. His brother,

Robert Karplus Robert Karplus (February 23, 1927 – March 20, 1990) was a theoretical physicist and leader in the field of science education. Early life Robert Karplus was born in Vienna, where he lived until the German occupation of Austria in 1938. He emigrate ...

, was an internationally recognized physicist and educator at

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant u ...

. Continuing with the academic family theme, his nephew,

Andrew Karplus Andrew is the English form of a given name common in many countries. In the 1990s, it was among the top ten most popular names given to boys in List of countries where English is an official language, English-speaking countries. "Andrew" is freq ...

, is a highly respected

biochemistry Biochemistry or biological chemistry is the study of chemical processes within and relating to living organisms. A sub-discipline of both chemistry and biology, biochemistry may be divided into three fields: structural biology, enzymology and ...

and

biophysics Biophysics is an interdisciplinary science that applies approaches and methods traditionally used in physics to study biological phenomena. Biophysics covers all scales of biological organization, from molecular to organismic and populations. ...

professor at

Oregon State University Oregon State University (OSU) is a public land-grant, research university in Corvallis, Oregon. OSU offers more than 200 undergraduate-degree programs along with a variety of graduate and doctoral degrees. It has the 10th largest engineering co ...

Education

After earning an AB degree from

Harvard College Harvard College is the undergraduate college of Harvard University, an Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636, Harvard College is the original school of Harvard University, the oldest institution of higher lea ...

in 1951, Karplus pursued graduate studies at the

California Institute of Technology The California Institute of Technology (branded as Caltech or CIT)The university itself only spells its short form as "Caltech"; the institution considers other spellings such a"Cal Tech" and "CalTech" incorrect. The institute is also occasional ...

. He completed his PhD in 1953 under Nobel laureate

Linus Pauling Linus Carl Pauling (; February 28, 1901August 19, 1994) was an American chemist, biochemist, chemical engineer, peace activist, author, and educator. He published more than 1,200 papers and books, of which about 850 dealt with scientific top ...

. According to Pauling, Karplus "was ismost brilliant student." He was an

NSF NSF may stand for: Political organizations *National Socialist Front, a Swedish National Socialist party *NS-Frauenschaft, the women's wing of the former German Nazi party *National Students Federation, a leftist Pakistani students' political gr ...

Postdoctoral Fellow at the

University of Oxford , mottoeng = The Lord is my light , established = , endowment = £6.1 billion (including colleges) (2019) , budget = £2.145 billion (2019–20) , chancellor ...

(1953–55) where he worked with

Charles Coulson Charles Alfred Coulson (13 December 1910 – 7 January 1974) was a British applied mathematician and theoretical chemist. Coulson's major scientific work was as a pioneer of the application of the quantum theory of valency to problems of m ...

Teaching career

Karplus taught at the

University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (U of I, Illinois, University of Illinois, or UIUC) is a public land-grant research university in Illinois in the twin cities of Champaign and Urbana. It is the flagship institution of the Universit ...

(1955–60) and then

Columbia University Columbia University (also known as Columbia, and officially as Columbia University in the City of New York) is a private research university in New York City. Established in 1754 as King's College on the grounds of Trinity Church in Manhatt ...

(1960–65) before moving to chemistry faculty at Harvard in 1966. He was a professor at the

Louis Pasteur University Louis Pasteur University (''Université Louis-Pasteur''), also known as Strasbourg I or ULP was a large university in Strasbourg, Alsace, France. As of 15 January 2007, there were 18,847 students enrolled at the university, including around 3 ...

in 1996 where he established a research group in Strasbourg, France, after two sabbatical visits between 1992 and 1995 in the NMR laboratory of Jean-François Lefèvre. He has supervised more than 200 graduate students and postdoctoral researchers over his career since 1955.

Research

He published his first academic paper when he was 17 years old. Karplus has contributed to many fields in physical chemistry, including chemical dynamics,

quantum chemistry Quantum chemistry, also called molecular quantum mechanics, is a branch of physical chemistry focused on the application of quantum mechanics to chemical systems, particularly towards the quantum-mechanical calculation of electronic contributions ...

, and most notably,

molecular dynamics Molecular dynamics (MD) is a computer simulation method for analyzing the physical movements of atoms and molecules. The atoms and molecules are allowed to interact for a fixed period of time, giving a view of the dynamic "evolution" of the ...

simulations of biological macromolecules. He has also been influential in

nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy Nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy, most commonly known as NMR spectroscopy or magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS), is a spectroscopic technique to observe local magnetic fields around atomic nuclei. The sample is placed in a magnetic fiel ...

, particularly to the understanding of nuclear spin-spin coupling and

electron spin resonance spectroscopy Electron paramagnetic resonance (EPR) or electron spin resonance (ESR) spectroscopy is a method for studying materials that have unpaired electrons. The basic concepts of EPR are analogous to those of nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR), but the spi ...

. The

Karplus equation The Karplus equation, named after Martin Karplus, describes the correlation between 3J-coupling constants and dihedral torsion angles in nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy: :J(\phi) = A \cos^2 \phi + B \cos\,\phi + C where ''J'' is the 3''J ...

describing the correlation between coupling constants and

dihedral angles A dihedral angle is the angle between two intersecting planes or half-planes. In chemistry, it is the clockwise angle between half-planes through two sets of three atoms, having two atoms in common. In solid geometry, it is defined as the uni ...

proton nuclear magnetic resonance Proton nuclear magnetic resonance (proton NMR, hydrogen-1 NMR, or 1H NMR) is the application of nuclear magnetic resonance in NMR spectroscopy with respect to hydrogen-1 nuclei within the molecules of a substance, in order to determine the struct ...

spectroscopy is named after him. In 1970 postdoctoral fellow

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 Quantum mechanics is a fundamental theory in physics that provides a description of the physical properties of nature at the scale of atoms and subatomic particles. It is the foundation of all quantum physics including quantum chemistry, ...

. In 1974 Karplus, Washel and other collaborators published a paper based on this type of modeling which successfully modeled the change in shape of retinal, a large complex protein molecule important to vision. His current research is concerned primarily with the properties of molecules of biological interest. His group originated and coordinated the development of the

CHARMM Chemistry at Harvard Macromolecular Mechanics (CHARMM) is the name of a widely used set of force fields for molecular dynamics, and the name for the molecular dynamics simulation and analysis computer software package associated with them. The CHA ...

program for

simulations.

Books

* Martin Karplus
Spinach on the Ceiling: The Multifaceted Life of a Theoretical Chemist
World Scientific Publishing, UK 2020. * CL Brooks III, M Karplus, BM Pettitt. Proteins: A Theoretical Perspective of Dynamics, Structure and Thermodynamics, Volume LXXI, in: Advances in Chemical Physics, John Wiley & Sons, New York 1988. * Martin Karplus and Richard N. Porter. Atoms and Molecules: An Introduction for Students of Physical Chemistry. W. A. Benjamin, New York 1970.

Notable students and postdocs

* Charles L. Brooks III (

University of Michigan, Ann Arbor , mottoeng = "Arts, Knowledge, Truth" , former_names = Catholepistemiad, or University of Michigania (1817–1821) , budget = $10.3 billion (2021) , endowment = $17 billion (2021)As o ...

) * Axel T. Brünger (

Stanford University Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is consider ...

) * J. Andrew McCammon (

UCSD The University of California, San Diego (UC San Diego or colloquially, UCSD) is a public land-grant research university in San Diego, California. Established in 1960 near the pre-existing Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego is t ...

) (w/ Karplus and Gelin) published the first MD simulation of BPTI (see above publication) * P. T. Narasimhan (

University of Illinois The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (U of I, Illinois, University of Illinois, or UIUC) is a public land-grant research university in Illinois in the twin cities of Champaign and Urbana. It is the flagship institution of the Univer ...

)

Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Sir Shanti Swaroop Bhatnagar OBE, FNI, FASc, FRS, FRIC, FInstP (21 February 1894 – 1 January 1955) was an Indian colloid chemist, academic and scientific administrator. The first director-general of the Council of Scientific and Indust ...

laureate * B. Montgomery Pettitt (

University of Texas Medical Branch The University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB) is a public academic health science center in Galveston, Texas. It is part of the University of Texas System. UTMB includes the oldest medical school in Texas, and has about 11,000 employees. In Febr ...

Baylor College of Medicine Baylor College of Medicine (BCM) is a medical school and research center in Houston, Texas, within the Texas Medical Center, the world's largest medical center. BCM is composed of four academic components: the School of Medicine, the Graduate S ...

, The Gulf Coast Consortia (GCC)]) * Benoît Roux (

University of Chicago The University of Chicago (UChicago, Chicago, U of C, or UChi) is a private research university in Chicago, Illinois. Its main campus is located in Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood. The University of Chicago is consistently ranked among the b ...

) *

Andrej Šali Andrej Šali (born 1963, Kranj, Slovenia) is a computational structural biologist. Since 2003, he has been Professor in the Department of Bioengineering and Therapeutic Sciences at University of California, San Francisco. He also serves as an edi ...

(

University of California, San Francisco The University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) is a public land-grant research university in San Francisco, California. It is part of the University of California system and is dedicated entirely to health science and life science. It con ...

) *

Klaus Schulten Klaus Schulten (January 12, 1947 – October 31, 2016) was a German-American computational biophysicist and the Swanlund Professor of Physics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Schulten used supercomputing techniques to app ...

(

) * Jeremy C. Smith (

Oak Ridge National Laboratory Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) is a U.S. multiprogram science and technology national laboratory sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and administered, managed, and operated by UT–Battelle as a federally funded research an ...

) * David J. States (

The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHealth) is a public academic health science center in Houston, Texas, United States. It was created in 1972 by The University of Texas System Board of Regents. It is located in the T ...

) *

(

University of Southern California The University of Southern California (USC, SC, or Southern Cal) is a Private university, private research university in Los Angeles, California, United States. Founded in 1880 by Robert M. Widney, it is the oldest private research university in C ...

) (co-recipient of the 2013 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, along with Karplus and

(Stanford))

Awards and honours

Karplus was elected a member of the

National Academy of Sciences The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) is a United States nonprofit, non-governmental organization. NAS is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, along with the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) and the Nati ...

in 1967. He was awarded the

Irving Langmuir Award The Irving Langmuir Prize in Chemical Physics is awarded annually, in even years by the American Chemical Society and in odd years by the American Physical Society. The award is meant to recognize and encourage outstanding interdisciplinary resear ...

in 1987. He is a member of the

International Academy of Quantum Molecular Science The International Academy of Quantum Molecular Science (IAQMS) is an international scientific learned society covering all applications of quantum theory to chemistry and chemical physics. It was created in Menton in 1967. The founding members we ...

. He became foreign member of the

Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences The Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences ( nl, Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen, abbreviated: KNAW) is an organization dedicated to the advancement of science and literature in the Netherlands. The academy is housed ...

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 The Linus Pauling Award is an award recognizing outstanding achievement in chemistry. It is awarded annually by thePuget SoundOregon
an

in 2004 and the

in 2013.

Personal life

Karplus is married to Marci and has three children.

References

External links

* including the Nobel Lecture on 8 December 2013 ''Development of Multiscale Models for Complex Chemical Systems From H+H₂ to Biomolecules''
Publications

Karplus research group at Harvard University

Biophysical Chemistry Laboratory at University of Strasbourg

Biography at Michigan State University website

Martin Karplus photography websiteMartin Karplus's autobiography ''Spinach on the Ceiling: The Multifaceted Life of a Theoretical Chemist''Meet the Author: Martin Karplus, book launch of ''Spinach on the Ceiling: The Multifaceted Life of a Theoretical Chemist''
{{DEFAULTSORT:Karplus, Martin 1930 births Living people Nobel laureates in Chemistry American Nobel laureates Austrian Nobel laureates Jewish Nobel laureates 21st-century American chemists Jewish biophysicists American biophysicists Jewish emigrants from Austria to the United Kingdom after the Anschluss California Institute of Technology alumni Foreign Members of the Royal Society Members of the International Academy of Quantum Molecular Science Harvard College alumni Harvard University faculty Jewish American scientists Jewish chemists Members of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences Members of the United States National Academy of Sciences Theoretical chemists Academic staff of the University of Strasbourg Columbia University faculty University of Illinois faculty Computational chemists