Arieh Warshel
Facts
© Nobel Media AB. Photo: A. Mahmoud
Arieh Warshel
The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2013
Born: 20 November 1940, Kibbutz Sde-Nahum, British Mandate of Palestine (now Israel)
Affiliation at the time of the award: University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA
Prize motivation: “for the development of multiscale models for complex chemical systems”
Prize share: 1/3
Life
Arieh Warshel was born in the Sde Nahum kibbutz in what was then British Palestine (now Israel). He studied first at Technion in Haifa, and received his Ph.D. from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot in 1969. After spending time at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts in the United States, Warshel worked at the Weizmann Institute of Science and the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England. He has worked at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles since 1976. Arieh Warshel is married with two daughters.
Work
The world around us is made up of atoms that are joined together to form molecules. During chemical reactions atoms change places and new molecules are formed. To accurately predict the course of the reactions at the sites where the reaction occurs advanced calculations based on quantum mechanics are required. For other parts of the molecules, it is possible to use the less complicated calculations of classical mechanics. In the 1970s, Arieh Warshel, Martin Karplus, and Michael Levitt successfully developed methods that combined quantum and classical mechanics to calculate the courses of chemical reactions using computers.
Nobel Prizes and laureates
Six prizes were awarded for achievements that have conferred the greatest benefit to humankind. The 12 laureates' work and discoveries range from proteins' structures and machine learning to fighting for a world free of nuclear weapons.
See them all presented here.
