News / Egypt

Egyptian Muslim Nobel laureate Zewail dies at 70

Wednesday, 03 August 2016 8:40 AM [ Last Update: Wednesday, 03 August 2016 8:45 AM ]

This file photo, taken on October 8, 2009, shows Ahmad Zewail attending a press conference before the Nobel Laureates Seminar in Vienna, Austria. (By AFP)

Egyptian Muslim chemist Ahmed Zewail, who won the Nobel Prize for his trailblazing contribution to chemistry, has died in the United States at the age of 70.

He passed away on Tuesday, reported the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), for which he had been working for more than four decades.

Zewail, a Muslim, was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1999 after he broke the ground on efforts to use laser to observe chemical reactions in real time.

He named his trademark work in the field of chemistry as femtochemistry, which tries to monitor chemical reactions at a scale of a femtosecond, or a millionth of a billionth of a second.

The innovative approach enables scientists to observe the bonding and busting of molecules as they are in motion.

During his stellar career, he was appointed as US President Barack Obama’s science advisor as well as his first science ambassador to the Middle East.

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