Bengt Nyman from Vaxholm, Sweden · CC BY 2.0

Michael Levitt helped invent multiscale modeling, the technique that lets chemists simulate large, complex molecules like proteins by combining classical and quantum mechanics within a single calculation — treating the reactive core with quantum physics and the surrounding structure more simply. Shared with Martin Karplus and Arieh Warshel, the work won the 2013 Nobel Prize in Chemistry and underlies much of modern computational biology. He has taught structural biology at Stanford since 1987.