Herman Johan Christiaan Berendsen (22 September 1934 – 7 October 2019) was a Dutch chemist. He was a professor of

physical chemistry Physical chemistry is the study of macroscopic and microscopic phenomena in chemical systems in terms of the principles, practices, and concepts of physics such as motion, energy, force, time, thermodynamics, quantum chemistry, statistica ...

at the

University of Groningen The University of Groningen (abbreviated as UG; nl, Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, abbreviated as RUG) is a public research university of more than 30,000 students in the city of Groningen in the Netherlands. Founded in 1614, the university is th ...

from 1967 to 1999.

Career

Berendsen was born on 22 September 1934 in

Apeldoorn Apeldoorn (; Dutch Low Saxon: ) is a municipality and city in the province of Gelderland in the centre of the Netherlands. It is located about 60 km east of Utrecht, 60 km west of Enschede, 25 km north of Arnhem and 35 km south of Zwolle. Th ...

. In 1962 he obtained his PhD ''cum laude'' from the University of Groningen, with a dissertation titled: "An NMR study of collagen hydration". In March 1963 Berendsen was appointed lector of physical chemistry at his ''alma mater'', and four years later became full professor. He retired in 1999. At Groningen Berendsen was group leader of

molecular dynamics Molecular dynamics (MD) is a computer simulation method for analyzing the physical movements of atoms and molecules. The atoms and molecules are allowed to interact for a fixed period of time, giving a view of the dynamic "evolution" of t ...

. In 1976 Berendsen and Wilfred van Gunsteren together with the 2013

Nobel Prize in Chemistry ) , image = Nobel Prize.png , alt = A golden medallion with an embossed image of a bearded man facing left in profile. To the left of the man is the text "ALFR•" then "NOBEL", and on the right, the text (smaller) "NAT•" then "M ...

winners Martin Karplus and

Michael Levitt Michael Levitt, ( he, 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. Levitt received the 2013 Nobel Prize in Chemistr ...

were involved in the start of theories on molecular calculating. Berendsen was elected a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1979. In 2013 he was awarded the Berni J. Alder Prize by the Centre européen de calcul atomique et moléculaire. The jury amongst other points praised his development of the

GROMOS GROningen MOlecular Simulation (GROMOS) is the name of a force field for molecular dynamics simulation, and a related computer software package. Both are developed at the University of Groningen, and at the Computer-Aided Chemistry Group at the ...

type of force field.

References

External links

Personal website of Berendsen

Profile
at the

Mathematics Genealogy Project The Mathematics Genealogy Project (MGP) is a web-based database for the academic genealogy of mathematicians.. By 31 December 2021, it contained information on 274,575 mathematical scientists who contributed to research-level mathematics. For a ty ...

{{DEFAULTSORT:Berendsen, Herman 1934 births 2019 deaths Dutch physical chemists Members of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences People from Apeldoorn University of Groningen alumni Academic staff of the University of Groningen