Klaus Schulten

Klaus Schulten (January 12, 1947 – October 31, 2016) was a German-American computational biophysicist and the Swanlund Professor of Physics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Schulten used supercomputing techniques to apply theoretical physics to the fields of biomedicine and bioengineering and dynamically model living systems. His mathematical, theoretical, and technological innovations led to key discoveries about the motion of biological cells, sensory processes in vision, animal navigation, light energy harvesting in photosynthesis, and learning in neural networks.

Schulten identified the goal of the life sciences as being to characterize biological systems from the atomic to the cellular level. He used petascale computers, and planned to use exa-scale computers, to model atomic-scale bio-chemical processes. His work made possible the dynamic simulation of the activities of thousands of proteins working together at the macromolecular level. His research group developed and distributed software for computational structural biology, which Schulten used to make a number of significant discoveries. The molecular dynamics package NAMD and the visualization software VMD are estimated to be used by at least 300,000 researchers worldwide. Schulten died in 2016 following an illness. Provided by Wikipedia