Martin Karplus was born in 1930 in Vienna, Austria. He and his family fled Austria during the Nazi occupation and lived briefly in La Baule, Switzerland, Zurich, and France before immigrating to the United States. He grew up in a family known for its intellectual and academic achievements. His grandfather, Johann Paul Karplus, was a respected professor of psychiatry at the University of Vienna, and his brother, Robert Karplus, was a notable physicist and educator at the University of California.
Karplus earned his AB degree from Harvard College in 1950. He then pursued his Ph.D. at the California Institute of Technology, where he studied under Nobel Laureate Linus Pauling. Pauling once described Karplus as the most brilliant student in his class. Karplus completed his Ph.D. in 1953.
After earning his doctorate, Karplus served as a National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Oxford, where he worked with Charles Coulson. Over the years, he held faculty positions at the University of Illinois and Columbia University before joining Harvard University. At Harvard, he became the Theodore William Richards Professor of Chemistry and later Professor Emeritus.
Karplus has directed a research group at the University of Strasbourg in France, collaborating within a joint laboratory organized between the University of Strasbourg and the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS). From 1992 to 1995, he also spent two sabbatical periods at the Jean-François Lefèvre NMR Laboratory at Louis Pasteur University in Strasbourg.
Martin Karplus made groundbreaking contributions to various fields within physical chemistry, including quantum chemistry, chemical dynamics, and particularly molecular dynamics simulations of biological macromolecules. His work provided significant insights into the behavior of complex chemical systems.
He developed computational methods that laid the foundation for modern molecular modeling. One of his most notable achievements is the development of the CHARMM (Chemistry at HARvard Macromolecular Mechanics) program, an influential tool used for molecular dynamics simulations in computational biology and chemistry.
Karplus contributed significantly to the field of nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy. He is especially known for formulating the Karplus Equation, which describes the relationship between dihedral angles and coupling constants in proton NMR spectroscopy. His work also advanced the understanding of electron spin resonance and nuclear spin-spin coupling in complex molecular systems.
| Birth Date: | 15 Mar, 1930 |
| Age: | 90 yrs |
| Occupations: | Theoretical chemist University teacher Biophysicist |
| Citizenship: | Austria United States of America |
| Birth Place: | Vienna |
| Education: | Harvard University California Institute of Technology |
| Gender: | Male |
| Description: | Austrian-born American theoretical chemist |
| Net Worth 2021: | 9 million |
