Michael Levitt

Born 9 May 1947 in South Africa, Michael Levitt came up through biophysics at a time when computers were just beginning to handle biological complexity. The work that defined him - developed with Martin Karplus and Arieh Warshel - married quantum mechanics for reactive centers with classical physics for the surrounding structure, letting scientists model protein behavior without impossible computation. Stanford made him a professor of structural biology in 1987, a post he's held since. The Nobel came in 2013. In 2018 he turned toward the data deluge, co-founding the Annual Review of Biomedical Data Science to shape how the field makes sense of itself.