24 Facts About Klaus Schulten

Klaus Schulten was a German-American computational biophysicist and the Swanlund Professor of Physics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Klaus Schulten identified the goal of the life sciences as being to characterize biological systems from the atomic to the cellular level.

Klaus Schulten used petascale computers, and planned to use exa-scale computers, to model atomic-scale bio-chemical processes.

Klaus Schulten's work made possible the dynamic simulation of the activities of thousands of proteins working together at the macromolecular level.

Klaus Schulten received a Diplom degree from the University of Munster in 1969 and a PhD in chemical physics from Harvard University in 1974, advised by Martin Karplus.

At Harvard Klaus Schulten studied vision, and the ways in which biomolecules respond to photoexcitation.

Klaus Schulten was particularly interested in studying retinal, a polyene and a chromophore of opsins.

Klaus Schulten was able to provide a theoretical explanation for experimental observations of an "optically forbidden" state which did not match predicted patterns of electronic excitation in polyenes.

Klaus Schulten classified electrons into covalent and non-covalent states, and determined that electrons that acted in a coordinated manner used less energy than those which were independent.

Klaus Schulten was particularly interested in implications of the magnetic field effect for biological systems such as electron transfer in photosynthesis.

Klaus Schulten began to explore the possibility that fast triplets could explain compass sensors in biological species such as migrating birds.

Klaus Schulten proposed that quantum entanglement of a radical-pair system could underlie a biochemical compass.

In 1980, Klaus Schulten became a professor of theoretical physics at the Technical University of Munich.

Klaus Schulten later worked with Michel and Deisenhofer on models of LH2 in photosynthesis.

Klaus Schulten recognized that a successful attack on modeling the photosynthetic reaction center would require parallel computing power.

Klaus Schulten used his research grants to support Munich students Helmut Grubmuller and Helmut Heller in building a custom parallel computer optimized for molecular dynamics simulations.

The T60 was small enough that Klaus Schulten was able to carry it through customs in a backpack, when he moved to the United States to join the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

In 1988, Klaus Schulten moved to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he founded the Theoretical and Computational Biophysics Group at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology in 1989.

Over time, Klaus Schulten targeted biological structures of increasing size and complexity, with larger and larger computers.

In 2006, Klaus Schulten's group modeled the satellite tobacco mosaic virus, emulating femtosecond interactions of approximately one million atoms in the virus and a surrounding drop of salt water for 50 billionths of a second.

In 2013, Klaus 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.

Klaus Schulten's team modeled the structure and function of a Purple bacteria's chromatophore, one of the simplest living examples of photosynthesis.

At his death Klaus Schulten was already planning simulations for the exa-scale Summit computer, expected to be built by 2018.

Klaus Schulten was a Fellow of the Biophysical Society and of the American Physical Society.