Raphael David Levine

Raphael David Levine was born in 1938 in Alexandria

Levine was born on March 29, 1938, in Alexandria, Egypt, to Haim Levine and Sonia Greenberg. He began school in Haifa, and in 1946 his family moved to Tel Aviv after his father was named chief engineer of the public works department. He finished high school with first prize in mathematics and physics.

He studied chemistry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, inspired by his high school chemistry teacher Arye Lahav, and wrote his thesis with Gabriel Stein. He graduated in 1960. In 1962 he went to England for doctoral studies at the universities of Nottingham and Oxford.

After graduating he joined the Armored Corps. He said that during his service he wrote a book on Soviet doctrine that remains classified.

In 1968 he returned to the Hebrew University as a full professor. His work covers the theory of reactive molecular collisions and unimolecular reactions, and his 1974 book laid foundations for molecular dynamics as a field. In 1981 he founded the Fritz Haber Minerva Center for Molecular Dynamics at the Hebrew University.

Since 1989 he has been a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. He received the Israel Prize in 1974 and shared the Wolf Prize in Chemistry with Joshua Jortner in 1988. He is a member of several academies, including the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities and the US National Academy of Sciences.