News

I was very sad to hear that Klaus Schulten passed away on November 1 after several months of illness. He was an enthusiastic collaborator and friend for more than a decade. We had just submitted a joint paper on a general method of describing domain motions in molecular machines for the Festschrift planned for the celebration of his 70^th birthday. Our earlier collaborations, in which his students Elizabeth Villa and Leonardo Trabuco played a key role, focused on the atomic modeling of the ribosome and on the development of a general modeling tool for the flexible fitting of cryo-EM density maps, MDFF.

Klaus Schulten was a computational biophysicist and the Swanlund Professor of Physics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His contributions to the field of molecular dynamics, which have given rise to the software packages NAMD and VMD, were influential and are widely acknowledged in the field. An obituary recognizing his lifetime achievements was just posted:

https://beckman.illinois.edu/news/2016/10/schulten-october2016