Barry Honig

Barry H. Honig (born 1941) is an American biochemist, molecular biophysicist, and computational biophysicist, who develops theoretical methods and computer software for "analyzing the physical chemical properties of macromolecules."

Honig graduated in 1963 from the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn with a bachelor's degree in chemistry and in 1964 with a master's degree from Johns Hopkins University. He received in 1968 his Ph.D. in chemical physics from the Weizmann Institute with thesis advisor Joshua Jortner.

Honig was at Harvard as a postdoc under Martin Karplus and at Columbia as a postdoc under Cyrus Levinthal. Since 1981 Honig has been a Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics at the Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons. He has supervised over a dozen doctoral students. He is the Director of Columbia's Center for Computational Biology and Bioinformatics and an investigator for the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI).

He is particularly noted for innovating methods to compute and display the electrostatic potentials of macromolecules based on their 3D structures. The computer programs DelPhi and GRASP were developed in his laboratory and are widely used by the academic and industrial communities.

The DelPhi web server utilizes the DelPhi program to provide electrostatic calculations for macromolecules and their complexes; it gives users a tool to "calculate electrostatic energies and the corresponding electrostatic potential and ionic distributions, and dielectric map."

Awards and honors

In 2004 he was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences. In 2007 he received the Alexander Hollaender Award in Biophysics for "pioneering theoretical and computational studies of electrostatic interactions in biological macromolecules and of the energetics of protein folding."