Short Biography of Martin Karplus
Martin Karplus was born in Vienna, Austria, and moved with his parents and brother to the United States in 1938. He was an undergraduate at Harvard College and went to the California Institute of Technology, where he received his PhD in Chemistry under Linus Pauling in 1953. He spent two years as a postdoctoral fellow in Oxford, England, before returning to the USA to join the faculty at the University of Illinois. In 1966 he became Professor of Chemistry at Harvard University, where he continues to do research. In 1996, he also became Profeseur Conventionné at the Université Louis Pasteur. He and his wife, Marci, divide their time between Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Strasbourg, France. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, and a foreign member of the Netherlands Academy of Arts & Sciences and the Royal Society of London. He received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in
2013.
Although his primary focus is university research and teaching, he took photographs for many years with a Leica IIIC in travels throughout parts of Europe, Asia, and North America. Recently he retired the Leica and replaced it with a Canon EOS 20D. Working with a digital camera has led him to approach photography in a new way.