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Published: 2014-05-15

Nobel laureate in chemistry to visit Umeå University

NEWS Professor Michael Levitt, one of the three 2013 Nobel Prize winners in Chemistry, will be visiting Umeå University on Thursday 5 June to lecture on his discoveries. He was invited by Uwe Sauer, who has known Levitt for more than 15 years and researches in the same field: structural biology and bioinformatics.

“My very first contact with Michael Levitt was through CASP, a protein structure competition for protein folding experts, where my group contributed with a protein in which participants would analyse the amino acid sequence and predict the structure,” says Uwe Sauer, associate professor and senior lecturer at the Department of Chemistry. “Michael Levitt and his research team attended the competition. I then met Levitt on several occasions at various conferences and so we have become acquaintances.”

This is not the first time that Michael Levitt will visit Umeå University. In 2001 he made a lecture tour through Sweden and Uwe Sauer was his host during his Umeå visit that time. He then spoke about the amazing progress that has been made in computational chemistry, and especially in the area of protein prediction. During that lecture, Levitt also pointed out another interesting technology that was going on at his university (Stanford University), a method which he thought seemed pretty smart. The name of the search engine was Google.

“Yet even his own calculations and programmes have been extremely successful and has now led to a Nobel Prize,” says Uwe Sauer.

Michael Levitt received an invitation to Umeå University in December in connection with the Nobel festivities. He chose to come to Umeå, in northern Sweden this June instead, partly because he wants to benefit from the bright summer nights, known as "white nights.”

In the 1970s, Michael Levitt, Martin Karplus, and Arieh Warshel laid the foundation for the powerful programmes that are used to understand and predict chemical processes. Computer models mirroring real life have become crucial for most advances made in chemistry today. They devised methods that use both classical and quantum physics. For instance, in simulations of how a drug couples to its target protein in the body, the computer performs quantum theoretical calculations on those atoms in the target protein that interact with the drug. The rest of the large protein is simulated using less demanding classical physics. The three were rewarded for the discoveries with the 2013 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

About the Nobel lecture:

Title: “Birth and future of multi-scale modelling of macromolecules”.
Date and Time: Thursday 5 June, 10:00 a.m. to 11:00 a.m.
Location: Stora hörsalen (large lecture hall), KBC building, Umeå University

The lecture is open for faculty, staff, students and others who are interested. It will be held in English and will be broadcast live via Umeå University’s Bambuser channel page: http://bambuser.com/channel/UmeaUniversitet
Free entrance. Please note that the number of seats to the lecture are limited!

For press and media:

Journalists wishing to attend the lecture are asked to contact Ingrid Söderbergh, e-mail: ingrid.soderbergh@adm.umu.se, to secure a place.

After the lecture, at 11:15 to 11:45, there is an opportunity for journalists to ask questions to Professsor Michael Levitt.

About Michael Levitt:

Professor Michael Levitt was born in 1947 in Pretoria, South Africa. He is a U.S., British and Israeli citizen. He has worked as a professor of structural biology at Stanford University in California since 1987. He earned a Ph.D. in biophysics at the University of Cambridge in 1971. He shared the 2013 Nobel Prize in Chemistry along with Martin Karplus and Arieh Warshel "for the development of multiscale models for complex chemical systems."

Read more about the 2013 Nobel Prize in ChemistryRead more about Michael Levitt’s researchHigh-resolution photo of Michael LevittPhoto caption: Michael Levitt, 2013 Nobel Laureate in Chemistry, will visit Umeå University on 5 June. Photographer: Linda Cicero

For further information, please contact:

Uwe Sauer, Senior LecturerDepartment of Chemistry, Umeå UniversityPhone: +46 (0)90 786 59 30, +46 (0)70-635 1803
E-mail: uwe.sauer@chem.umu.se

Editor: David Meyers