Michael Levitt

Michael Levitt is an American British Israeli biophysicist. In addition, he has been serving as a professor of structural biology at Stanford University in the United States since 1987. Currently a member of the National Academy of Sciences in the United States from 2013 to present. In 1983, Levitt was elected as a member of the European Molecular Biology Organization EMBO. In 2001, he was elected as a member of the Royal Society of England. Afterwards, they jointly won the 2013 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Martin Karplus and Arieh Warshel for developing multi-scale models of complex chemical systems. In 2014, he was awarded the Delano Prize in Computational Biology. In 2015, he became a member of the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB). Levitt was one of the earliest researchers to conduct DNA and protein molecular dynamics simulations, and developed the first software for this purpose. Currently, Levitt is renowned for developing macromolecular structure prediction methods and has participated in many key evaluation CASP competitions on protein structure prediction techniques. During this period, he criticized the ineffectiveness of molecular dynamics in improving protein structure. Levitt is also committed to simplifying protein structure representations for analyzing protein folding and stacking, as well as developing scoring systems for large-scale sequence structure comparisons.