Martin Karplus was born on March 15, 1930, in Vienna, Austria.[8][9] He was a child when his family fled from theNazi-occupation in Austria a few days after theAnschluss in March 1938, spending several months in Zürich, Switzerland and La Baule, France before immigrating to the United States.[10] Prior to their immigration to the United States, the family was known for being "an intellectual and successful secularJewish family" in Vienna.[11] His grandfather,Johann Paul Karplus (1866–1936) was a highly acclaimed professor of psychiatry at the University of Vienna.[12] His great-aunt,Eugenie Goldstern, was an ethnologist who was killed during the Holocaust.[13] He was the nephew, by marriage, of the sociologist, philosopher and musicologistTheodor W. Adorno and grandnephew of the physicistRobert von Lieben. His brother,Robert Karplus, was an internationally recognized physicist and educator atUniversity of California, Berkeley. Continuing with the academic family theme, his nephew, Andrew Karplus, is abiochemistry andbiophysics professor atOregon State University.[14]
He was a professor at theLouis Pasteur University in 1996 where he established a research group in Strasbourg, France, after two sabbatical visits between 1992 and 1995 in the NMR laboratory of Jean-François Lefèvre. He has supervised more than 200 graduate students and postdoctoral researchers over his career since 1955.[19]
In 1970 postdoctoral fellowArieh Warshel joined Karplus at Harvard. Together they wrote a computer program that modeled the atomic nuclei and some electrons of a molecule using classical physics and modeling other electrons usingquantum mechanics. In 1974 Karplus, Warshel and other collaborators published a paper based on this type of modeling, which successfully modeled the change in shape ofretinal, a large complex protein molecule important to vision.[16]
His research was concerned primarily with the properties of molecules of biological interest. His group originated and coordinated the development of theCHARMM program formolecular dynamics simulations.[24]
Karplus, Martin (2020).Spinach on the Ceiling: The Multifaceted Life of a Theoretical Chemist. WORLD SCIENTIFIC (EUROPE).doi:10.1142/q0238.ISBN978-1-78634-802-9.
Brooks, Charles L.; Karplus, Martin; Pettitt, B. Montgomery (November 16, 1988).Advances in Chemical Physics, Volume 71. New York: Wiley-Interscience.ISBN978-0-471-62801-9.
Karplus, Martin; Porter, Richard N. (1970).Atoms and Molecules: An Introduction for Students of Physical Chemistry. New York: W. A. Benjamin.ISBN978-0-8053-5218-4.
^"Martin Karplus".Department of Chemistry, Michigan State University. May 13, 2024.Archived from the original on July 22, 2024. RetrievedJanuary 3, 2025.
^Fuller, Robert (2002).A Love of Discovery: Science Education – The Second Career of Robert Karplus. New York: Kluwer Academic. p. 293.ISBN978-0-306-46687-8.
Martin Karplus on Nobelprize.org – including the Nobel Lecture on December 8, 2013 "Development of Multiscale Models for Complex Chemical Systems From H+H2 to Biomolecules"
– including the Nobel Lecture on December 8, 2013 "Development of Multiscale Models for Complex Chemical Systems From H+H2 to Biomolecules"
