Michael Levitt

Michael Levitt was born in 1947 in Pretoria

Michael Levitt was born on 9 May 1947 in Pretoria, South Africa, to a Jewish family. His father came from Lithuania and his mother from the Czech Republic. The family moved to England when he was 15.

He studied physics at King's College London and graduated in 1967. That year he visited Israel for the first time, and he married Rina, an Israeli artist. He earned his PhD in computational biology at Cambridge, where he wrote a computer program for studying the shapes of molecules.

He worked as a staff scientist at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge. In 1979 he moved to Israel to do research at the Weizmann Institute of Science, and he became an Israeli citizen in 1980. From 1980 to 1987 he was a professor of chemical physics there.

Since 1987 he has been a professor of structural biology at Stanford University, and he has divided his time between Israel and California. He was among the first to run computer simulations of the motion of DNA and proteins, and he worked on predicting the structures of large molecules. In 2013 he shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Martin Karplus and Arieh Warshel for models of complex chemical systems.

During the coronavirus pandemic he made predictions about its spread that proved wrong, and he opposed lockdowns. His wife Rina died in 2017.