Ahmed Zewail

Ahmed Hassan Zewail was an Egyptian-American chemist and Nobel laureate celebrated as the father of femtochemistry. Raised in Alexandria where he graduated with first-class honors from the University of Alexandria, Zewail moved to the United States to earn his doctorate at the University of Pennsylvania, subsequently joining the faculty at Caltech in Pasadena, California, where he held the Linus Pauling Chair in Chemistry.

In the late 1980s, Zewail developed ultra-fast laser systems capable of emitting flashes of laser light lasting just tens of femtoseconds (10^-15 seconds). Using these ultrafast flashes like an ultra-high-speed camera strobe, Zewail was able to photograph the exact transition states of chemical reactions as chemical bonds broke and reformed in real time. For creating the field of femtochemistry, Zewail was awarded the 1999 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, becoming the first Arab to receive a science Nobel. He was awarded Egypt's highest civilian honor, the Grand Collar of the Nile, and founded the Zewail City of Science and Technology in Cairo.