A Nobel Prize medal. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

Two former Israelis, who were named as Nobel Prize winners for 2013, traveled to Stockholm to receive their awards, thereby joining the 10 other Israelis who have won the award.

Professor Arieh Warshel of the University of Southern California and Professor Michael Levitt of Stanford University, one-time colleagues at Israel’s Weizmann Institute of Science, were set to receive the prize, which was announced in October, along with Professor Martin Karplus of Harvard University.

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry will be given to Karplus, Levitt and Warshel as a result of the computerized models of complex chemical systems that the three developed, which are today considered the foundation of the software used to understand and predict chemical processes.

Levitt, born in Pretoria, South Africa, moved to Israel in 1983 at the age of 35. He worked at the Weizmann Institute for a few years before moving to the United States to work at Stanford University. Levitt also spent several years as a faculty member at the Weizmann Institute and is today a visiting researcher there.

Warshel finished his undergraduate degree at Israel’s Technion Institute of Technology in 1966. In 1967, he earned his master’s degree from the Weizmann Institute, completing his doctorate there in 1969.

Karplus, a Jewish-American, spent a sabbatical year at the Weizmann Institute.