Prof. Arieh Warshel, 2013 Nobel Prize Laureate in Chemistry, shared his work in computational studies on the functional properties of biological molecules at the Forum of Great Minds on July 4th at USTC. During the lecture entitled “How to Model the Action of Complex Biological Systems on a Molecular Level?”, Prof. Warshel introduced the methods that combined quantum and classical mechanics to calculate the courses of chemical reactions using computers.

Prof. Warshel is an Israel-American biochemist/biophysicist at the University of Southern California (USC). He is a member of the US National Academy of Sciences, the Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry (HonFRSC), the Distinguished Professor-at-Large of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen (CUHK (SZ)) and the Honorary Director of the newly-established Arieh Warshel Institute of Computational Biology at CUHK (SZ). Prof. Warshel shared 2013 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Prof. Michael Levitt from Stanford University and Prof. Martin Karplus from Harvard University for the development of multiscale models for complex chemical systems.

The event was co-organized by the Administration of Foreign Experts Affairs of Anhui Province, the USTC Initiative Foundation (USTCIF), the USTC Graduate School and the Hefei National Laboratory for Physical Sciences at the Microscale (HFNL), with the sponsorship from the Science and Technology Bureau of Hefei City and the Overseas Expertise Introduction Center for Discipline Innovation (“111 Center”).

(Written by XU Yunfei, edited by YANG Xinqi, USTC News Center)