“When I was a young man, my goal was to look with mathematical and computational means at the inside of cells, one atom at a time, to decipher how living systems work. That is what I strived for and I never deflected from this goal.” — Klaus Schulten from the Beckman Institute
Klaus Schulten, professor of physics and Beckman Institute faculty member for nearly 25 years, has died after an illness. He was 69 years old.
Schulten, who led the Theoretical and Computational Biophysics Group, was a leader in the field of biophysics, conducting seminal work in the area of molecular dynamics simulations, illuminating biological processes and structures in ways that weren’t possible before. His research focused on the structure and function of supramolecular systems in the living cell, and on the development of non-equilibrium statistical mechanical descriptions and efficient computing tools for structural biology. Schulten received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1974. At Illinois, he was Swanlund Professor of Physics and was affiliated with the Department of Chemistry as well as with the Center for Biophysics and Computational Biology; he was Director of the Biotechnology Research Center for Biomolecular Modeling and Bioinformatics as well as Co-Director of the Center for the Physics of Living Cells.
As detailed in the Wikipedia, Klaus Schulten had a remarkable body of work. He was a frequent speaker at the SC conference series as well ISC, GTC, and many others. I enjoyed his talks very much and he was truly one of the great ones at conveying why HPC matters.
