Klaus Schulten
| Klaus Schulten | |
|---|---|
| Born |
January 12, 1947 Recklinghausen, Germany |
| Died | October 31, 2016 (aged 69) Urbana, Illinois, U.S. |
| Fields | Physics, Chemistry, Biophysics, Computational biology |
| Institutions | University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign |
| Alma mater | Harvard University |
| Doctoral advisor | Martin Karplus |
| Doctoral students | Axel Brunger |
| Known for | Molecular dynamics, Photosynthesis, High performance computing, Molecular graphics |
| Notable awards | Biophysical Society National Lecturer, Sidney Fernbach Award |
| Spouse | Zaida Luthey-Schulten |
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Website http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/~kschulte |
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 “Klaus Schulten, The Computational Microscope“, TEDxUIUC
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“Interview Klaus Schulten, 2015 National Lecturer, Biophysical Society
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Klaus Schulten (January 12, 1947 – October 31, 2016) was a German-American computational biophysicist and the Swanlund Professor of Physics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Schulten used supercomputing techniques to apply theoretical physics to the fields of biomedicine and bioengineering and dynamically model living systems. His mathematical, theoretical, and technological innovations led to key discoveries about the motion of biological cells, sensory processes in vision, animal navigation, light energy harvesting in photosynthesis, and learning in neural networks.
Schulten identified the goal of the life sciences as being to characterize biological systems from the atomic to the cellular level. He used petascale computers, and planned to use exa-scale computers, to model atomic-scale bio-chemical processes. His work made possible the dynamic simulation of the activities of thousands of proteins working together at the macromolecular level. His research group developed and distributed software for computational structural biology, which Schulten used to make a number of significant discoveries. The molecular dynamics package NAMD and the visualization software VMD are estimated to be used by at least 300,000 researchers worldwide. Schulten died in 2016 following an illness.
Schulten received a Diplom degree from the University of Münster in 1969 and a PhD in chemical physics from Harvard University in 1974, advised by Martin Karplus. At Harvard Schulten studied vision, and the ways in which biomolecules respond to photoexcitation. He was particularly interested in studying retinal, a polyene and a chromophore of visual pigment. Schulten was able to provide a theoretical explanation for experimental observations of an "optically forbidden" state which did not match predicted patterns of electronic excitation in polyenes. Schulten classified electrons into covalent and non-covalent states, and determined that electrons that acted in a coordinated (covalent) manner used less energy than those which were independent (non-covalent).
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