Ahmed Zewail: A force for Egyptian science

Abstract

Undoubtedly, Dr. Ahmed Zewail, who passed away on August 2, 2016, had a strong, positive impact on science in the Middle East and in the West. I knew Zewail as one of his mentors and close friends. Zewail wanted to come from Egypt (Alexandria University) to get his PhD in my group at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Unfortunately, I was away on sabbatical and thus did not see his letter of interest, and my secretary answered him, advising him to apply for admission to get his PhD at UCLA first and then to come talk to me when I returned from overseas. He came to the United States and received his PhD working with the late Professor Robin Hochstrasser at the University of Pennsylvania and was doing research in chemical physics, which was very close to my own research at that time. Ahmed Zewail. Courtesy of the Archives, California Institute of Technology. We became very close friends, and he always used me as a sounding board during the successful rise of his academic career. He was very bright, highly motivated, and very hard-working, and he had an excellent sense of humor. Because Hochstrasser and I overlapped greatly in our scientific research interests for a long period, it was natural that Zewail and I frequently … [↵][1]1Email: melsayed{at}gatech.edu. [1]: #xref-corresp-1-1