At a meeting of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences on May 5, 2026, the following tribute to the life and service of the late Martin Karplus was spread upon the permanent records of the Faculty.
Born: March 15, 1930Died: Dec. 29, 2024
Martin Karplus, the Theodore William Richards Professor of Chemistry, Emeritus, at Harvard University and a 2013 Nobel Laureate in Chemistry, died on Dec. 29, 2024, at the age of 94. His work — entirely computational but always inspired by experimental observations — spanned chemistry, physics, and biology. In a career that extended over more than half a century and resulted in nearly 900 publications, Karplus transformed our understanding of molecular systems through his groundbreaking work in computational modeling by molecular dynamics simulations.
Karplus was born in Vienna, Austria, on March 15, 1930, into a family with a long and distinguished medical lineage. His early years were marked by a culture of intellectual richness and suburban comfort in the wine-growing district of Grinzing, but his peaceful Viennese childhood was shattered by the rise of Nazism and the Anschluss in March 1938. Within days, Karplus, his brother, Robert, and their mother fled by train to Switzerland, while his father was forced to remain behind in a Viennese jail as a hostage to ensure the family’s assets were not smuggled out. The family eventually secured visas for the United States through an affidavit provided by his uncle’s employer in Boston.
