Michael Levitt, FRS[12] (Hebrew: מיכאל לויט; born 9 May 1947) is a South African-born biophysicist and a professor of structural biology at Stanford University, a position he has held since 1987.

[13][14] Levitt received the 2013 Nobel Prize in Chemistry,[15] together with Martin Karplus and Arieh Warshel, for "the development of multiscale models for complex chemical systems".

Levitt was one of the first researchers to conduct molecular dynamics simulations of DNA and proteins and developed the first software for this purpose.

[34] He has also worked on simplified representations of protein structure for analysing folding and packing,[35][36][37] as well as developing scoring systems for large-scale sequence-structure comparisons.

[citation needed] Levitt has been outspoken during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, and made a number of wrong predictions on the disease's spread based on his own modelling.

[47] Levitt has also raised concerns about potential damaging effects of COVID-19 lockdown orders on economic activity as well in increasing suicide and abuse rates,[42] and has signed the Great Barrington Declaration,[48] a statement supported by a group of academics advocating for alternatives to lockdowns which has been criticized by the WHO and other public health organizations as dangerous and lacking in sound scientific basis.

[49][50] Critics have expressed concern regarding Levitt's incorrect or potentially misleading predictions as well as his anti-lockdown positions, in part due to his status as a Nobel laureate and his large following on Twitter.

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