Jurados

He was born on May 9, 1947, in Pretoria, South Africa, to a Jewish family.

He studied at King's College London where graduated in Physics in 1967 He earned his PhD in Computational Biology in 1972 from the Laboratory of Molecular Biology at Cambridge University. He is a Professor of Structural Biology at Stanford University School of Medicine, California, United States.

He became one of the first researchers to carry out molecular dynamics simulations of DNA and proteins and developed the first software for this purpose.

Recognized for his development of methods for predicting macromolecular structures. On October 9, 2013, Michael Levitt was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, along with Martin Karplus and Arieh Warshel for laying the foundation, in the 1970s, for powerful computer models that allow us to understand and predict complex chemical systems. "These models mirror real life and became crucial for today's most advanced chemistry," according to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

Thanks to his work, the foundations were laid for computer programs used to understand certain chemical processes. These programs simulate the real-life behavior of chemical reactions (which occur in fractions of a microsecond), eliminating the need for a traditional laboratory experiment. This allows for easy hypothesis-solving and predictions.

In addition to practical applications, the simulation of chemical processes would help, among others, to study how to create new materials or drugs. Another application would be, for example, to use computer science to learn the different ways in which a solar cell can grow and which of the resulting organisms would be most efficient at capturing light, which could be used to generate electricity.

Levitt is the father of the so-called computational biology, and his contribution to the work was based on the creation of the theoretical and conceptual framework on which these programs are founded. He also developed the first models of large macromolecular complexes.