From left to right, 2013 Nobel Prize in chemistry winners Arieh Warshel, Michael Levitt and Martin KarplusIsraeli professor Arieh Warshel on Wednesday won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry, along with fellow Jewish professors Michael Levitt (who also holds Israeli citizenship) and Martin Karplus.
Warshel, 72, is a distinguished professor of chemistry and biochemistry at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, where he has been since the 1970s.
Fellow winner Michael Levitt, a South Africa-born professor, taught at the Weizmann Institute in Rehovot for most of the 1980s. Vienna-born Martin Karplus fled the Nazi occupation of Austria as a child in 1938.
Of the 23 chemistry Nobels awarded in the past decade, 11 of the winners were Jewish and six of them were Israelis. But both Warshel and Levitt left Israel for the US because they felt they could not progress here, underlining concerns about the ongoing brain drain of top Israeli academics.
The trio won the award “for the development of multiscale models for complex chemical systems,” the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced.
Source: timesofisrael
