Arab American Scientist Highlights

Nobel Prize laureate for his pioneering studies on histocompatibility complexes.

Baruj Benacerraf was born in Caracas, Venezuela in 1920. Benacerraf moved to the U.S. at the age of 20 to pursue a college education. He got his B.S. at Columbia University School of General Studies in 1942. Benacerraf obtained his M.D. from the medical college of Virginia. During his medical studies, Benacerraf was drafted to the U.S. military and served for 3 years. After his military service, Benacerraf began his career of research at Columbia University. He would also research in Paris, at New York University, and at the National Institute of Health before establishing himself as an immunologist professor at Harvard University. He primarily researched immune system hypersensitivity, allergies, and autoimmune disorders. In1980, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for discovering over 30 genes which control the bodies immune response. He discovered this by observing the differences in antigen responses from various animals with similar heredity. Benacerraf was also awarded the National Medal of Science, the Rous-Whipple Award, the Gold-Headed Cane Award.

“Competition in itself encourages creativity and creativity is the basis of knowledge” – Farouk El-Baz

Dr. Farouk El-Baz is an Egyptian-American space scientist and geologist. He earned his B.Sc. in chemistry and geology at Ain Shams University in Cairo (1958) and further earned his Ph.D. in geology at the University of Missouri at Rolla (1964). In 1967, El-Baz began work at NASA, where he played the primary role in determining the ideal Moon landing site for the Apollo 11 mission. Much later in his career, he joined Boston University to research the geology of Earth (1986). El-Baz used satellite images to understand the origins of deserts and as a result, uncovered many sand-buried rivers and streams in the Sahara. This analysis was used to identify the location of groundwater in the deserts of Egypt, Oman, the UAE, and Sudan. His numerous honors include being a Senior Advisor to Egypt’s former president Hosni Mubarak and being elected a member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering in Washington, DC (2002).

“To the field of synthetic chemistry belongs an array of responsibilities which are crucial for the future of mankind, not only with regard to the health and needs of our society, but also for the attainment of a deep understanding of matter, chemical change, and life.” – Elias James Corey

Prof. Elias James Corey is an American organic chemist. Born to Lebanese immigrant parents, Corey credits his ability to cope with adversity to his family escaping a “tragically torn country”. Upon moving to the United States, his family also struggled through the Great Depression and World War II. At the age of 16, Corey began studying at MIT, where he earned bachelor’s degree in 1948 and a Ph.D. under Prof. John C. Sheehan in 1951. Soon after, he joined UIUC and became a full professor in 1956 (at the age of 27). Since 1959, he has been a professor at Harvard University studied organic chemistry. Over his career, he developed numerous reagents, such as PCC and TBS, and reaction pathways. Corey also developed the methodology of retrosynthesis, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry (1990). For all his contributions to organic chemistry, he was awarded the National Medal of Science (1988) and ACS’s greatest honor, the Priestley Medal (2004).

“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.