Nobel laureate Arieh Warshel invested into the American Academy of Sciences and Letters

Arieh Warshel, Distinguished Professor of Chemistry at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences and a pioneer in computational biophysics, was invested as a member of the American Academy of Sciences and Letters (AASL) at a ceremony held at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., on Oct. 23.

The organization was founded in 2023 to promote scholarship and honor outstanding achievement in the arts, sciences and learned professions. It also emphasizes intellectual courage.

“This is a great honor for me. I am humbled by the induction and the academy membership,” said Warshel. “I very much support the academy’s mission of promoting the freedom of the human mind, and the need to be unafraid to follow truth, wherever it leads you.”

AASL President Donald Landry noted that all of this year’s new members reflect the independence of mind the academy strives to honor.

“Like other academies, we honor intellectual excellence, but our academy is distinguished by a special accent on intellectual courage. All our new members this year reflect the independence of mind we strive to honor,” he said.

Warshel was born and raised in Israel, where he earned a master’s degree and a PhD in chemical physics from the Weizmann Institute of Science. His autobiography, From Kibbutz Fishponds to The Nobel Prize: Taking Molecular Functions into Cyberspace, recounted how his scientific success required resilience.

“I never wrote an important paper that was not rejected first,” he told USC Dornsife News in 2021. “And I’m perhaps the only Nobel laureate whose paper that led to the Nobel Prize was discussed in a promotion process when I was denied tenure.”

That denial of tenure eventually led him to join the USC faculty in 1976, where he has remained ever since. His research focuses on the development of computer models of biological molecules, work which has helped drive drug design.

In 2013, he and two colleagues received the Nobel Prize in chemistry for their groundbreaking work developing key principles behind computer simulations that are now indispensable in the study of chemical reactions. Warshel is also a fellow of the National Academy of Sciences and an honorary member of the Royal Society of Chemistry.

Alongside Warshel, AASL also inducted fellow Nobel laureate Jennifer Doudna, who has conducted trail-blazing work in CRISPR gene editing, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Harvard professor and host of the popular PBS TV show Finding Your Roots, and celebrated author Salman Rushdie as members.