Ahmed H. Zewail, Gr'74, Hon'97
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Dr. Ahmed H. Zewail received the 1999 Nobel Prize in chemistry for his use of a rapid laser technique to view and study chemical reactions at the atomic level in real time.
The Linus Pauling Professor of Chemical Physics and director of the Laboratory for Molecular Sciences at the California Institute of Technology, Dr. Zewail pioneered the field of femtochemistry, the probing of chemical reactions that occur in a femtosecond or a millionth of a billionth of a second.
Born in Egypt but now a U.S. citizen, Dr. Zewail received his bachelor's and master's degrees from Egypt's Alexandria University. He received his doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania in 1974 and joined the Caltech faculty in 1976. In 1995, Egyptian President Mubarak honored Dr. Zewail with the Order of Merit, First Class. His other international awards include the Medal of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, the King Faisal Prize, the Welch Prize, the Wolf Prize, the Carl Zeiss Award, the Leonardo da Vinci Award of Excellence and the Bonner Chemiepreis Award.