The Nobel Prize Committee in Sweden announced on Wednesday that Professor Arieh Warshel, a former Israeli national who are currently living in the US, is among its 2013 Chemistry Prize laureates.

Prof. Warshel, who currently works at the University of Southern California (USC), won the award alongside Prof. Michael Levitt (South Africa) from Stanford University and Prof. Martin Karplus (Austria) from Strasburg and Harvard universities, for their research and development of "multi-scale models for complex chemical system."

He was born in Kibbutz Sdeh Nahum in northern Israel and has been living in the United States for the past 40 years, focusing his research on "Theoretical Chemistry and Biophysics." He achieved his first degrees from the Weitzman Institute of Science in Rehovot and the Technion Technological Institute in Haifa.

In his first interview given from his home in California to Army Radio, he said he is excited and considers himself Israeli.

"I'm partly Israeli," he said. "I feel I am Israeli, I visit Israel and my girls speak Hebrew," he said.

The 72 year-old professor explained that his research has helped understand how proteins work. "We built models in the computer through which we can understand what the protein does," he said. "With that information, we can cure a lot of diseases, caused by proteins not working properly."

In its statement earlier on Wednesday, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences noted that the prize recipients "laid the foundation for the powerful programs that are used to understand and predict chemical processes."

"Those models became crucial for most advances made in chemistry today," the statement added.

According to Prof. Warshel's profile page at the USC website, his research covers problems in modern biophysical chemistry.

"He and his peers have pioneered several of the most effective models for computer simulations of biological and chemical molecules," according to the website.

In 2011, Prof. Dan Shecthman from the Technion Institute won Chemistry Nobel Prize for his "discovery of quasicrystals."

In 2009, Israeli biology researcher Prof. Ada Yonat from the Weizmann institute won the Biology Nobel Prize for her studies of the Ribosome, its structure and activity, producing the proteins of the living cell.