Professor Arieh Warshel, recipient of the 2013 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, was celebrated at an event at the USC Town and Gown attended by faculty colleagues from across campus.
Warshel is a distinguished professor of chemistry at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences and fellow of the National Academy of Sciences.
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced the Nobel Prize in chemistry for 2013 on Oct. 9 to Warshel and two colleagues for developing the key principles behind computer simulations that are now indispensable in the study of chemical reactions.
Warshel, Martin Karplus of the Université de Strasbourg in France and Harvard University, and Michael Levitt of Stanford University were recognized for “the development of multiscale models for complex chemical systems.” Their crucial achievement was to marry classical and quantum mechanics in order to model both the relatively large-scale movements of atoms in a molecule, and the minute dances of the free electrons that shuttle between atoms and spark many chemical reactions.
Read the complete article at USC News.