Michael Levitt, American chemist who was awarded the 2013 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for developing accurate computer models of chemical reactions that were able to use features of both classical physics and quantum mechanics.

Levitt received a bachelor’s degree in physics (1967) from King’s College in London. He worked as a visiting fellow at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Reḥovot, Israel, from 1967 to 1968. He received a doctorate in biophysics jointly granted by the Medical Research Council (MRC) Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England, and the University of Cambridge in 1971. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the Weizmann Institute from 1972 to 1974 and a staff scientist at the MRC Laboratory from 1974 to 1979. In 1987, he was invited to work at Stanford University in California and has remained there ever since as Professor of Structural Biology.