“I don’t know all the reasons for these achievements, but I know that I love what I do and I have never wanted to rest on my laurels.”– Ahmed Zewail
Zewail was an Egyptian-American physical chemist born in Damanhur, Egypt in 1946. Zewail was fascinated by physics and chemistry in grade school and was fortunately appointed to study physical science as a career. Zewail attended the University of Alexandria, University of Pennsylvania, and UC-Berkeley. At Berkeley and during a post-doc at Caltech, Zewail developed femtochemistry. He also helped improve TEM resolution by 10 orders of magnitude and became the first Science Envoy to the Middle East. He was awarded the Nobel Prize and other honors for his work.