5 Ahmed Hassan Zewail
John Kaiser; Alex Meier; Mckenzy Chu; Abby Rickman; Anna Scarpaci; Raegan Stiger; Maclaine Spears; and Shuai Sun
Ahmed Hassan Zewail was born in 1946 in Damanhur, Egypt. Growing up in Alexandria, Ahmed was the only son among three girls. His father worked in the government while his mother was a stay-at-home mom. As a child, Ahmed naturally gravitated towards physical sciences, especially math, engineering, and chemistry. When choosing where to go for his secondary education, Ahmed was pushed heavily by his parents to study abroad. Despite this, Ackman decided to study in Egypt for his college.
During Zewail’s childhood, the 23 July Revolution took place, culminating in the ousting of the Egyptian monarchy. The revolutionaries that spearheaded this revolution were mainly concerned with decolonization and modernizing politics in Northern Africa and the Middle East. The 23 July Revolution would establish Gamal Nasser as president of Egypt. Under Nasser’s rule, a new standardized test was created that modernized Egyptian education. One aspect of this education reform was the Thanaweya Amma, a standardized test that any prospective college students must take. Zewail took the test, and was assigned to attended the University of Alexandria. It was here that Zewail would earn both a B.S. and M.D. degree in chemistry. Zewail successfully completed his Master’s degree in a short period of time, lasting only 18 months compared to the typical two year program.
Upon completing his Master’s degree, Zewail was again compelled by his professors to go abroad and study. Two of his professors, Professor El Ezaby and Professor El Tantaway, recommended that Zewail study spectral changes of various molecules in different solvents. At first apprehensive, Zewail eventually applied to travel to the United States. Zewail’s initial hesitance lied with geopolitical conflicts at the time. Nasser’s reign over Egypt had led to the country siding with the Soviet Union. Many Egyptians studying abroad would therefore either go to the U.S.S.R. or to Eastern Europe for their research. Additionally, Zewail had no ties to the United States and practically no knowledge of how to assimilate. Regardless, Zewail was offered a scholarship by the University of Pennsylvania and a stipend, both of which would allow him to complete his studies.
As a foreigner, Zewail found it difficult to become accustomed to the social structure and language of the United States. This was especially difficult when he was trying to form friendships. A lot of communication between individuals, such as humor and flow of conversation, is language and culture-specific. Despite this, Zewail was enamored by the new knowledge he was acquiring, as well as the new culture that he was being exposed to.
After finishing his PhD, Zewail ruminated on whether he should return to Egypt or stay in the U.S. to become a professor. Ultimately, Zewail decided that the U.S. was a better option because of the better resources and academic freedom that he could have. Although Zewail decided to stay in the U.S., he still held very strong pride in his Egyptian ethnicity.
With his decision to stay in the United States, Zewail ended up taking a position at Berkley. He found that he could connect with many of his peers through a shared love of science. One of these peers was Charles Harris, who would offer Zewail an IBM fellowship. However, Zewail was more interested in an assistant professorship at Caltech. Zewail would become a Professor, and would continue the rest of his academic career there. Zewail’s work at Caltech would earn him a Nobel Prize in 1999. This served as a realization of a dream he had since his childhood, as he reminisced over times when he was younger and Egyptian scientists would be recognized for their achievements.
Zewail’s interests extended beyond just the chemistry lab. In addition to his chemistry work, Zewail engaged in political and social activism in Egypt. The same year he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, he was awarded the Grand Collar of the Nile. This award was given to Egyptian citizens who had contributed to Egyptian society. Zewail is the only scientist to have received this award. In 2010, Zewail was also named as a science envoy to Muslim-majority countries throughout the world. One of Zewail’s books Reflections on World Affairs, Peace, and Politics, looked at the connections between Egypt, the U.S., and the role of science on global affairs. During the 2011 Egyptian protests, Zewail also served as a communications envoy between the military state and revolutionary groups that were protesting the brutality of the government. Zewail would pass in 2016 at the age of 70, survived by his wife and four kids. A national funeral, attended by the Egyptian President, Prime Minister, and many very important Egyptian officials and Muslim leaders, was held in Cairo.
Ahmed Zewail was a pioneer in the field of femtochemistry. While Zewail received many accolades throughout his career, this is most evident by his Nobel prize. Ahmed Zewail was the first Egyptian/Arab man to win The Nobel Prize in Chemistry. His research changed the world in the way that we now understand chemical reactions. Ahmed’s research used laser technology to snapshot the exact moment in which the chemical reaction occurred. He used a technique of rapid ultrafast lasers to be able to determine that it is possible to map out chemical reactions. Zewail was able to study the bonds and formations of these chemical reactions in detail. Later he designed a four-dimensional ultrafast electron microscope, this helped to visualize how complex chemical reactions are. The microscope showed the physical and chemical changes between the chemical reactions.
In his career, Zewail was a chemist, professor, and advisor to the United States. After he earned his PhD from Berkeley, Zewail became a professor at the California Institute of Technology. Zewail’s main focus in research was femtochemistry, his main research is what made him known around the world today. His research group in CalTech was designing and constructing instruments to view chemical reactions. In 2009, he served was appointed to the Advisory Science Council to The United States under the administration of former President Barack Obama. While he served in the advisory council, he raised awareness of the need to invest in fundamental research of science and mathematics. He believed that this initial investment would help economic development but provide political stability in The United States. He is the reason that Barack Obama started a new program of Science Envoys specifically for the United States and Muslims.
Although Zewail was widely successful, his work primarily involved femtochemistry. Femtochemistry studies the area of physical chemistry that looks over chemical reactions in a short timescale. This is an important contribution to chemistry because it explains why chemical reactions react in the way that they do. Zewail became known as the “father of femtochemistry” due to how much he progressed the field. Zewail used laser technology as a method to capture chemical reactions. These lasers used sub– angstrom (1×10-10 m) resolution to capture the chemical reactions as they were happening. This allowed Zewail to view transition states and intermediates occurring within a reaction. A transition state is a period in a reaction where bonds are between formed and broken. This state is incredibly unstable and so passes very quickly. An intermediate occurs when a reaction has more than one step. The chemical bonds between intermediates are still fully formed, but intermediates are less stable than the final product, and so also are short lived. These interactions between molecules are called elementary steps which are the simplest steps that can orrcur, and there are multiple types. A unimolecular step occurs when the reactant is only one molecule, there are also bimolecular processes (two molecules) and trimolecular processes (three molecules). Since femtochemistry is looking at such small amounts of sample and such small timescales, generally elementary processes are observed. The first reaction characterized by Zewail, the decay of ICN, is a unimolecular reaction that was characterized with a timescale of 40 femtoseconds.
In order to study such fast reactions, Zewail needed to be able to look at very small timeframes. Similar to slow motion in movies and sports, Zewail used lasers to look at the changes in molecules every few femtoseconds (1 x 10-15 s). This was performed using a technique called pump-probe spectroscopy. In this experiment a high-energy laser is used to excite electrons to a higher energy level, and a lower-energy laser is followed soon after to monitor any changes occurring in the sample. This allows for humans to be able to “see” on the femtosecond timescale as each of these laser pulses can act like a frame in a movie.
Ahmed Zewail has forever changed the way the world understands chemical reactions. Ahmed Hassan Zewail’s discovery of femtochemistry sparked not just interest, but an entire new field of chemistry. His expertise was not just noted by his peers and he was even appointed as an advisor to the president due to his prestigious work.
