Klaus Schulten was a pioneering computational biophysicist who fundamentally transformed the application of computational methods to biological systems. Born in Recklinghausen, Germany on January 12, 1947, he earned his physics degree from the University of Muenster in 1969 before obtaining his Ph.D. in chemical physics from Harvard University in 1974. He began his research career at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen, where he worked until 1980, before becoming a professor at the Technical University of Munich. In 1988, Schulten joined the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as a Professor of Physics, where he was appointed the Swanlund Professor of Physics and became a cornerstone of the institution's scientific excellence until his passing in 2016. His visionary leadership established him as a foundational figure in the development of computational biophysics as a distinct scientific discipline.
Schulten devoted over forty years to establishing the physical mechanisms underlying processes in living systems from atomic to organism scale, championing the concept of a "computational microscope" to augment experimental research. His group developed essential software tools including VMD for interactive biomolecular visualization and NAMD for large-scale molecular dynamics simulations, which have become foundational resources for researchers worldwide. His innovative work spanned diverse biological phenomena including cellular motion, vision mechanisms, animal navigation, photosynthetic energy harvesting, and neural network learning. Schulten's research produced over 660 publications with more than 80,000 citations, with landmark applications to complex systems such as the 300,000-atom ribosome and 4 million-atom HIV capsid, demonstrating the power of computational approaches to tackle previously intractable biological questions. His methodological innovations, particularly Molecular Dynamics Flexible Fitting, enabled unprecedented insights into biomolecular structure and function across multiple scales.
Beyond his research, Schulten profoundly impacted the field through his dedication to education and mentorship, training 77-80 PhD students many of whom now hold distinguished academic positions, and personally instructing over 1,000 young scientists through hands-on workshops. As director of the NIH Center for Macromolecular Modeling and Bioinformatics and co-director of the NSF Center for the Physics of Living Cells, he built enduring research infrastructure that continues to advance the field. His leadership extended to pioneering the use of supercomputing resources including Blue Waters, where he was among the first researchers to harness its capabilities for biological discovery. Schulten received numerous prestigious honors including the Biophysical Society National Lecturer distinction, the IEEE Sidney Fernbach Award, and the Biophysical Society Distinguished Service Award, recognizing his transformative contributions to the field. His legacy endures through his widely adopted software, his extensive publication record, and the generations of scientists he inspired to explore the physical foundations of life through computational approaches.
