Klaus Schulten

Klaus Schulten is a German American computational biophysicist and the Swanlund Professor of Physics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.^[1]

Academic career

Schulten received the Diplom degree from the University of Muenster in 1969 and received his PhD in chemical physics from Harvard University in 1974, advised by Martin Karplus. After graduating, he joined the Max Planck Institute, where he remained till 1980. He then became a professor of theoretical physics at the Technical University of Munich, where he advised notable biophysicist Axel Brunger as a PhD student. In 1988 he moved to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), where he is a member of the Beckman Institute and a founding member of the Theoretical and Computational Biophysics Group.^[1]

Research

Schulten's research group is well known for the development of software for computational structural biology, including the molecular dynamics package NAMD and the visualization software VMD. The early development of NAMD at UIUC grew out of efforts by Schulten's students in Munich to build a custom parallel computer optimized for molecular dynamics simulations.^[2]

Schulten's recent work has concentrated on molecular modeling using graphical processing units (GPUs), particularly using molecular dynamics in combination with cryo-electron microscopy to study the structures of large macromolecular complexes. In 2013 Schulten's group published a simulated structure of the human immunodeficiency virus capsid containing 64 million atoms, among the largest simulations reported, produced using the supercomputer Blue Waters.^[3]

Awards and memberships

Schulten is a Fellow of the Biophysical Society (2012) and of the American Physical Society (1993). He received the Sidney Fernbach Award from the IEEE Computer Society in 2012, and the Biophysical Society Distinguished Service Award in 2013.^[1]

References