Ahmed Zewail

Ahmed H. Zewail was born in Egypt in 1946, where he received his early formal education at Alexandria University (B.S. 1967 and M.S. 1969). He went to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1969 and after earning his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1974, he joined the University of California at Berkeley as an IBM Research Fellow. Shortly afterward (1976), he joined the faculty of the California Institute of Technology. In 1990, he was honored with the first Linus Pauling Professorship of Chemical Physics at Caltech.