Arieh Warshel

Arieh Warshel (אריה ורשל; born November 20, 1940) is an Israeli-American biochemist and biophysicist. He is a pioneer in computational studies on functional properties of biological molecules, Distinguished Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry, and holds the Dana and David Dornsife Chair in Chemistry at the University of Southern California. He received the 2013 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, together with Michael Levitt and Martin Karplus for "the development of multiscale models for complex chemical systems". Warshel was born to a Jewish family in 1940 in kibbutz Sde Nahum, Mandatory Palestine. Warshel served in the Israeli Armored Corps. After serving the Israeli Army (final rank Captain), Warshel attended the Technion, Haifa, where he received his BSc degree in chemistry, summa cum laude, in 1966. Subsequently, he earned both MSc and PhD degrees in Chemical Physics (in 1967 and 1969, respectively), with Shneior Lifson at Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel. After his PhD, he did postdoctoral work at Harvard University until 1972, and from 1972 to 1976 he returned to the Weizmann Institute and worked for the Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge, England. After being denied tenure by Weizmann Institute in 1976, he joined the faculty of the department of chemistry at USC. He was awarded the 2013 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. As a soldier, he fought in both the 1967 Six-Day War and the 1973 Yom Kippur War, attaining the rank of captain in the IDF. As part of Shenzhen's 13th Five-Year Plan funding research in emerging technologies and opening "Nobel laureate research labs", in April 2017 he opened the Warshel Institute for Computational Biology at the CUHK Shenzhen campus. Warshel is known for his work on computational biochemistry and biophysics, in particular for pioneering computer simulations of the functions of biological systems, and for developing what is known today as Computational Enzymology.