Martin Karplus (1930-2024)
CCB mourns the loss of Martin Karplus, Theodore William Richards Professor of Chemistry, Emeritus at Harvard University, who passed away on December 28, 2024 at the age of 94.
Martin Karplus was born in Vienna, Austria, and moved with his parents and brother to the United States in 1938. He was an undergraduate at Harvard College and went to the California Institute of Technology, where he received his PhD in Chemistry under Linus Pauling in 1953. He spent two years as a postdoctoral fellow in Oxford, England, before returning to the USA to join the faculty at the University of Illinois. In 1966 he became Professor of Chemistry at Harvard University, where he continued to do research. In 1996, he also became Profeseur Conventionné at the Université Louis Pasteur. He and his wife, Marci, divided their time between Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Strasbourg, France. He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, and a foreign member of the Netherlands Academy of Arts & Sciences and the Royal Society of London.
Karplus received the 2013 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, together with Michael Levitt and Arieh Warshel, for "the development of multiscale models for complex chemical systems."