Arieh Warshel

Arieh Warshel was born in 1940 in Sde Nahum

Arieh Warshel was born in 1940 to a Jewish family in kibbutz Sde Nahum, in Mandatory Palestine.

He served in the IDF Armored Corps as a signals officer and reached the rank of captain. He fought in the Six-Day War and the Yom Kippur War.

He earned a BSc in chemistry with highest honors from the Technion in 1966, where he also met his wife. At the Weizmann Institute of Science he completed an MSc in 1967 and a PhD in 1969 under Shneior Lifson. In this period he began working with Michael Levitt.

After postdoctoral work at Harvard University, he returned to the Weizmann Institute from 1972 to 1976 and also worked at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge. After he was denied tenure, he joined the chemistry department of the University of Southern California in 1976. His work introduced computer simulations of biological molecules, including the QM/MM method for enzyme reactions.

In 2013 he shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Martin Karplus and Michael Levitt. In 2017 he opened the Warshel Institute for Computational Biology in Shenzhen, and in 2025 he was elected to the Serbian Academy of Sciences. He and his wife have 2 daughters.