Michael Levitt

Michael Levitt
Nobel Prize Laureate Michael Levitt during 2013 press conference in
Born	(1947-05-09) 9 May 1947 (age 69) Pretoria, South Africa
Citizenship	American, Israeli, British
Fields	Computational Structural Biology Structure Determination Simulation of Mesoscale Molecular Dynamics
Institutions	Stanford University Weizmann Institute of Science Laboratory of Molecular Biology University of Cambridge
Alma mater	King's College London (BSc) Peterhouse, Cambridge (PhD)
Thesis	Conformation analysis of proteins (1972)
Doctoral advisor	Robert Diamond
Doctoral students	Nizar Batada Gaurav Chopra David Hinds Miriam Hirshberg Enoch Huang Rachel Kolodny Chris Lee Sergio Moreno Britt Park Adelene Sim Michael Sykes Jerry Tsai Dahlia Weiss Yu Xia
Other notable students	(postdocs) Julie Bernauer Steven Brenner Cyrus Chothia Valerie Daggett Mark Gerstein Boris Fain Julian Gough Xuhui Huang Chen Kaesar Peter Minary Leonid Pereyaslavets Tanya Raschke Abraham O. Samson Gunnar Schroeder Ram Samudrala Junjie Zhang
Notable awards	EMBO Membership (1983) FRS (2001) Member of the National Academy of Sciences (2002) Nobel Prize in Chemistry (2013) DeLano Award (2014)
Spouse	Rina
Website csb.stanford.edu/levitt med.stanford.edu/profiles/Michael_Levitt

Michael Levitt, FRS (Hebrew: מיכאל לויט‎‎; born 9 May 1947) is an American-British-Israelibiophysicist and a professor of structural biology at Stanford University, a position he has held since 1987. Levitt received the 2013 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, together with Martin Karplus and Arieh Warshel, for "the development of multiscale models for complex chemical systems".

Michael Levitt was born in Pretoria, South Africa, to a Jewish family from Plungė, Lithuania; his father was Lithuanian and his mother is of Czech descent. He attended Sunnyside Primary School and then Pretoria Boys High School between 1960 and 1962. The family moved to England when he was 15. Levitt spent 1963 studying applied mathematics at the University of Pretoria. He attended King's College London, graduating with a Bachelor of Science degree in Physics in 1967.

In 1967, he visited Israel for the first time. Together with his Israeli wife, Rina, a multimedia artist, he left to study at Cambridge, where his three children were born. In 1979, he returned to Israel and conducted research at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, becoming an Israeli citizen in 1980. He served in the Israeli Defense Forces for six weeks in 1985. In 1986, he began teaching at Stanford, and since then has split his time between Israel and California.