Michael Levitt is a biophysicist and a professor of structural biology at Stanford University. Levitt received the 2013 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for “the development of multiscale models for complex chemical systems”.
Michael Levitt, PhD, has dramatically advanced the field of structural biology by developing sophisticated computer algorithms to build models of complex biological molecules.
In early 2013, Levitt’s group at Stanford employed novel methods to figure out the structure of an important class of molecules in a way that explains their function in greater detail that known before. The molecules under study were the most complex of a larger group of proteins called chaperonins, key “helper” proteins within all cells that act as midwives and monkey-wrenches to tease nascent or damaged proteins into their proper active shapes.
