Arieh Warshel

University of Southern California

Arieh Warshel is an Israeli-American computational chemist at the University of Southern California who co-developed the QM/MM (quantum mechanics/molecular mechanics) approach for studying enzyme mechanisms and chemical reactions in complex biological environments. His foundational insight was that combining quantum mechanics — necessary to describe bond breaking and formation — with classical molecular mechanics for the surrounding protein environment makes it computationally tractable to study enzyme catalysis at atomic resolution. Warshel's simulations of lysozyme and other enzyme reactions revealed why enzymes are so much faster than uncatalyzed reactions in solution, answering a central question in biochemistry. He also contributed the empirical valence bond (EVB) method, now widely used in computational enzymology. Warshel shared the 2013 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Martin Karplus and Michael Levitt. His work is directly applied in the pharmaceutical industry for lead optimization, understanding drug resistance, and enzyme engineering for industrial biotechnology.