Prof Michael Levitt received King's Honorary Doctorate

Physics alumnus and Nobel Prize Winner Prof Michael Levitt was conferred a King's College London Honorary Doctorate at the ceremony held on 12 November 2014 in the Chapel at the Strand Campus. Prof Levitt is a pioneer in computational biophysics and biochemistry and he is Professor of Structural Biology at Stanford University. He received his first-class BSc with Special Honours in the Department of Physics from King’s in 1967 and was the winner of the 2013 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the “development of multiscale models for complex chemical systems” together with Martin Karplus and Arieh Warshel. His is the 6th Nobel Prize, to be awarded to a member Department of Physics at King's College London.

Prof. Levitt delivered a lecture on the “Birth and Future of Multi-scale Modeling of Macromolecules” at the Guys Campus. This event was jointly organized by the Randall Division, the Department of Chemistry, the Department of Physics and the Thomas Young Centre. He then visited the Department of Physics where he met staff and students, before the Honorary Degree Ceremony took place. The interdisciplinary research area of biomolecular modelling, which was established when Prof Levitt performed the first computer simulations of proteins with atomistic details, has since then greatly expanded and is represented by a number of groups at King’s, including members of the Theory and Simulation of Condensed Matter group in the Department of Physics.

For further information on this, please contact Carla Molteni: carla.molteni@kcl.ac.uk