Martin Karplus

Martin Karplus (born March 15, 1930, Vienna) is an Austrian-born American theoretical chemist. He has been Theodore William Richards Professor of Chemistry at Harvard University since 1979. He is also Director of the Biophysical Chemistry Laboratory, a joint laboratory of CNRS and Universite de Strasbourg in Strasbourg, France.

He received a BA degree from Harvard University in 1950, and a Ph.D. from California Institute of Technology in 1953 while working with Linus Pauling. He was an NSF Postdoctoral Fellow at Oxford University (1953–55) where he worked with Charles Coulson. His brother, Robert Karplus, was an internationally recognised physicist and educator at University of California, Berkeley.

Contributions

Martin Karplus has made significant contributions to many fields in physical chemistry, including the nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy, chemical dynamics, quantum chemistry, and most notably, the molecular dynamics simulations of biological macromolecules.

Karplus has made varied contributions to nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy, particularly to the understanding of nuclear spin-spin coupling and electron spin resonance spectroscopy. The Karplus equation describing the correlation between coupling constants and dihedral angles in protein nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy is named after him.

With Andrew McCammon and Bruce Gelin, he published the first molecular dynamics simulation of a protein, the Bovine Pancreatic Trypsin Inhibitor BPTI.^[1]

Current research

His current research is concerned primarily with the properties of molecules of biological interest. His group originated and currently coordinates the development of the CHARMM program for molecular dynamics simulations. He is a member of the International Academy of Quantum Molecular Science. He has supervised over 200 graduate students and postdoctoral researchers in his long career (since 1955) in the University of Illinois, Columbia University, and Harvard University.

Notable students

• Bruce Gelin (w/ Karplus and McCammon published first MD simulation of BPTI)--"Dynamics of Folded Proteins")
• J. Andrew McCammon [1] (UCSD) (w/ Karplus and Gelin published first MD simulation of BPTI (see above publication)
• B. Montgomery Pettitt [2] (University of Houston, Baylor College of Medicine, The W.M. Keck Center for Interdisciplinary Bioscience Training)
• Jianpeng Ma (Baylor College of Medicine, Rice University)
• Jeremy C. Smith (Oak Ridge National Laboratory)
• David J. States (The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston)
• Martin J. Field [3] (CEA Grenoble)
• Barry Honig [4] (Columbia University)

See also

• Robert Karplus

References

1. ^ McCammon, J. A.; Gelin, B. R.; Karplus, M. (1977). "Dynamics of folded proteins". Nature 267 (5612): 585–590. doi:10.1038/267585a0. PMID 301613.  edit

• M. Karplus (2006). "Spinach on the Ceiling: A Theoretical Chemist's Return to Biology" (autobiography). Annual Review of Biophysics and Biomolecular Structure 35 (1): 1–47. doi:10.1146/annurev.biophys.33.110502.133350. PMID 16689626. 

External links

• Publications
• Karplus research group at Harvard University
• Biophysical Chemistry Laboratory at University of Strasbourg
• Biography at Michigan State University website
• Martin Karplus photography website

See also: Karplus

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Name	Karplus, Martin
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Date of birth	March 15, 1930
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