Nobel Laureate in Chemistry, 1999

Ahmed H. Zewail was born in 1946 in a small town near the delta of the Nile, and currently lives in San Marino (California). He and his wife Dema, a physician in public health, have four children.

Zewail received his B.S. and M.S. degrees from Alexandria University in 1967, and his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1974. After two years as an IBM research fellow at the University of California at Berkeley, in 1976 he was appointed to the faculty of the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). After two years he gained tenure and in 1982 became a full professor. Since 1990 he has been the first Linus Pauling Chair Professor of Chemistry and Professor of Physics.

At the end of the 1980s Zewail performed a series of experiments that were to lead to the birth of the research area called "femtochemistry". This involves imaging molecules in the actual course of chemical reactions, and trying to capture pictures of them in the transition state. Zewail's technique uses what may be described as the world's fastest camera. This uses laser flashes of such short duration that they operate on the time scale at which the reactions actually happen, femtoseconds (fs), that is 10^-15 seconds, or 0.0000000000000001 seconds.

In 1999 he received the Nobel Prize in chemistry "for his studies of the transition states of chemical reactions using femtosecond spectroscopy", in other words "for showing that it is possible to see how atoms in a molecule move during a chemical reaction".

Femtochemistry enables us to understand why certain chemical reactions take place but not others. We can also explain why the speed and yield of reactions depend on temperature. Scientists the world over are studying processes with femtosecond spectroscopy in gases, in fluids and in solids, on surfaces and in polymers. Applications range from how catalysts function and how molecular electronic components must be designed, to the most delicate mechanisms in life processes and how the medicines of the future should be produced.

Zewail holds honorary degrees from universities all over the world and is a member of a number of scientific academies. He has served as Visiting Professor in many universities in Europe and the US, and his work has received wide recognition with many important international honors and awards. In 1995 he received the Order of Merit, first class, from the Egyptian president Mubarak, and in 1998 a postage stamp bearing his portrait was issued by Egypt. He is the first Egyptian scientist ever to receive a Nobel Prize.