Michael Levitt — chem (nobel) with roots in the Russian Empire
Michael Levitt is a South African-British-American computational biologist born in Pretoria to parents with Lithuanian Jewish roots who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2013 for developing multiscale models for complex chemical systems. His work enables computer simulations of biological molecules that underpin modern drug discovery.
Tracing the roots — Lithuania (Plungė)
Born in Pretoria in 1947 to parents of Lithuanian Jewish descent — his family traces to the communities of the Russian Empire's Lithuanian Pale — Levitt grew up in South Africa and Israel before building his academic career at Cambridge and Stanford. His Nobel Prize is part of the extraordinary overrepresentation of families from the Russian Empire's Jewish intellectual tradition in 20th-century science.
Born in South Africa to Lithuanian-Jewish immigrants.
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Lithuania (Plungė). At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.