Lecturer Information

Michael Levitt is the Robert W. and Vivian K. Cahill Professor of Cancer Research in Structural Biology at Stanford School of Medicine and a founding member of Bio-X. Born in South Africa in 1947, he studied physics in London and structural biology in Cambridge, and spent 1967 with Shneior Lifson at the Weizmann Institute. He worked at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, the Salk Institute with Francis Crick, and the Weizmann Institute before Stanford in 1987.
One of the first computational biologists, he works on multiscale methods, protein and nucleic acid structure, molecular dynamics and protein folding. He co-discovered the four protein fold classes, introduced simplified protein representations, and devised the Jack-Levitt method for X-ray refinement. He remains an active programmer, a craft he is proud of. Elected to the Royal Society in 2001 and the US National Academy of Sciences in 2002, he shared the 2013 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Martin Karplus and Arieh Warshel for multiscale modelling of complex chemical systems.
Since January 2020 his scientific attention has gone to COVID-19 and mortality, with John Ioannidis at Stanford. His ambition is to solve hard problems and give young scientists the independence his generation enjoyed.