Ahmed Zewailأحمد زويل

Zewail was born in 1946 in Damanhur and grew up in Alexandria, the son of a man who worked as a bicycle and motorbike fitter before becoming a government official. He earned his bachelor's and master's degrees at the University of Alexandria, then moved to the United States, completing his PhD at the University of Pennsylvania in 1974. After research at the University of California, Berkeley, he joined the faculty of the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in 1976, where he would spend the rest of his career. In 1990 he became Caltech's first Linus Pauling Professor of Chemical Physics, holding a chair named for one of the greatest chemists of the twentieth century.

Zewail's great achievement was to make the invisible visible. Chemical reactions happen almost unimaginably fast — in femtoseconds. A femtosecond is one millionth of a billionth of a second; to put it in scale, one femtosecond is to a single second as a second is to about 32 million years. Using bursts of laser light lasting just that long — in effect the world's fastest camera — Zewail captured atoms in "slow motion" during a reaction, watching in real time as bonds actually break and new ones form. This founded an entirely new field, femtochemistry, letting scientists observe nature at its most fundamental level. He later extended the idea to invent a "4D" electron microscope able to see matter moving in both space and time.

In 1999, Zewail was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry — as the sole laureate — "for his studies of the transition states of chemical reactions using femtosecond spectroscopy." He became the first Egyptian and first Arab to win a Nobel Prize in a scientific field, and only the third Egyptian laureate of any kind, after Anwar Sadat (Peace, 1978) and the novelist Naguib Mahfouz (Literature, 1988). The honour was celebrated across Egypt, which awarded him its highest decoration, the Grand Collar of the Nile. Over his career he also received many of science's top awards, including the Wolf Prize, the Priestley Medal, and the Royal Society's Davy Medal, and was elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Society.

Zewail believed deeply that science could transform the developing world, and he became a kind of scientific statesman. He served as one of the first United States Science Envoys and sat on the US President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, while tirelessly urging greater investment in science and education in Egypt and the wider Middle East. That mission found lasting form in Zewail City of Science and Technology, a research university and science city in Egypt that carries his name and his vision. He died in 2016 at the age of 70, mourned as a national hero and an enduring role model — proof to young Egyptians that a student from Damanhur could reach the very summit of world science.

• Who he was: an Egyptian-American chemist, the "father of femtochemistry."
• Arabic name: أحمد زويل (Ahmed Zewail).
• Lived: 1946 (Damanhur) – 2016 (Pasadena, California).
• Education: University of Alexandria (BS, MS); PhD, University of Pennsylvania (1974); then Caltech.
• Breakthrough: femtochemistry — using femtosecond laser pulses to watch atoms move during reactions.
• Nobel Prize: Chemistry, 1999 (sole laureate) — the first Egyptian and Arab science laureate.
• Also invented: "4D" electron microscopy, seeing matter in space and time.
• Honours: the Grand Collar of the Nile, the Wolf, Priestley, and Davy medals, and many more.
• Legacy: a US Science Envoy and the namesake of Zewail City of Science and Technology in Egypt.

Sources include the Nobel Prize organisation, Encyclopaedia Britannica, Caltech, and Egypt's State Information Service.