1999 Nobel Prize Winner In Chemistry Featured Speaker For Baylor's Annual Gooch-Stephens Lecture

by LoAna Lopez

Dr. Ahmed H. Zewail, the 1999 Nobel Prize winner in chemistry and the first Linus Pauling Chair Professor of Chemistry and Professor of Physics at the California Institute of Technology, will present Baylor University's annual Gooch-Stephens Lecture. The event is hosted by Baylor's chemistry and biochemistry department and is open to the public.
His lecture, "Freezing Time: The Six Millennia Race of Femtoseconds," will begin at 8 p.m., Monday, April 17, in Room 100 of Marrs McLean Science Building on the Baylor campus. Zewail's lecture will touch on the discoveries that have opened up new vistas in the microscopic world, and explore mankind's race against time and the culmination in femtoscience.
Director of the National Science Foundation Laboratory for Molecular Sciences, Zewail earned degrees from Alexandria University in Egypt and the University of Pennsylvania. He holds numerous honorary degrees and was appointed to the faculty at Caltech in 1976. For his research and contributions to the science world, Zewail has received numerous distinguished awards including the Robert A. Welch Prize Award, the Benjamin Franklin Medal and several honors from the American Physical Society and the American Chemistry Society. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences in the United States and comparable science societies in Europe.
Zewail's current research is devoted to developments of ultrafast lasers and electrons for studies of dynamics in chemistry and biology.
The Gooch-Stephens lecture series is an endowed lecture named for past department chairs, Wilby T. Gooch (also Baylor's first recipient of a master's of science degree in chemistry) and William R. Stephens. More than half of these lecturers over the past 25 years have been Nobel Prize winners in chemistry. For more information, call the chemistry and biochemistry department at 710-3311.