THE NOBEL LAUREATES OF AFRICA - AHMED ZEWAIL HASSAN

Ahmed Hassan Zewail (born February 26, 1946) is an American and Egyptian scientist, known as the "father of femtochemistry", he won the 1999 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on femtochemistry and became the first Arab scientist to win a Nobel Prize in a scientific field. He is the Linus Pauling Chair Professor of Chemistry, Professor of Physics, and the director of the Physical Biology Center for Ultrafast Science and Technology at the California Institute of Technology.

Career

After completing his PhD, Zewail did postdoctoral research at the University of California, Berkeley supervised by Charles Bonner Harris. Following this, he was awarded a faculty appointment at the California Institute of Technology in 1976, where he has remained since 1990, he was made the first Linus Pauling Chair in Chemical Physics. He became a naturalized citizen of the United States in 1982.

Zewail has been nominated and will participate in President Barack Obama's Presidential Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST), an advisory group of the nation's leading scientists and engineers to advise the President and Vice President and formulate policy in the areas of science, technology, and innovation.

Awards and Honors

In 1999, Zewail became the third Egyptian national to receive the Nobel Prize. Zewail gave his Nobel Lecture on "Femtochemistry: Atomic-Scale Dynamics of the Chemical Bond Using Ultrafast Lasers". His prize was following Egyptian president Anwar Al-Sadat (1978 in Peace), Naguib Mahfouz (1988 in Literature). Mohamed ElBaradei followed him (2005 in peace). Other international awards include the Wolf Prize in Chemistry (1993) awarded to him by the Wolf Foundation, the Tolman Medal (1997), the Robert A. Welch Award (1997), the Othmer Gold Medal in 2009, the Priestley Medal from the American Chemical Society and Davy Medal from the Royal Society in 2011.He was elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Society (ForMemRS) in 2001. In 1999, he received Egypt's highest state honor, the Grand Collar of the Nile.

Zewail was awarded an honorary doctorate by Lund University in Sweden in May 2003 and is a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. Cambridge University awarded him an honorary Doctor of Science in 2006. In October 2006, Zewail received the Albert Einstein World Award of Science for his pioneering development of the new field femtoscience and for his seminal contributions to the revolutionary discipline of physical biology, creating new ways for better understanding the functional behavior of biological systems by directly visualizing them in the four dimensions of space and time. In May 2008, Zewail received an honorary doctorate from Complutense University of Madrid. In February, 2009, Zewail was awarded an honorary doctorate in arts and sciences by the University of Jordan. In May 2010, he received a Doctor of Humane Letters from Southwestern University. In October/2011 he was awarded an honorary doctorate in science from the University of Glasgow, UK His students include scientists like Martin Gruebele. He also has won the King Faisal award in 1989. The Zewail city of science and technology is named in his honour.

Zewail also received an Honorary Doctorate from Heriot-Watt University in 2002.