Ahmed Hassan Zewail, a Nobel Laureate who conducted his graduate work at Penn and received an honorary Penn degree, died on August 2 at age 70.

Dr. Zewail, the first Egyptian and Arab to win a Nobel Prize in science, was considered a pioneer of ultrafast chemistry.

Dr. Zewail grew up in Desouk, Egypt, and earned undergraduate and master’s degrees in chemistry at the University of Alexandria in Alexandria, Egypt, in 1967 and 1969 respectively. He conducted graduate work at Penn on novel spectroscopies, including optically detected magnetic resonance, with Robin Hochstrasser, and received his PhD in 1974. His postdoctoral work, on coherence in multidimensional systems and energy transfer in solids, took place at the University of California, Berkeley, with Charles B. Harris. He joined the California Institute of Technology in 1976 as an assistant professor and became the first Linus Pauling Professor of Chemistry in 1995.

Dr. Zewail was a recipient of an honorary degree from Penn in 1997 and was recognized for being the first to realize the significance of ultrafast laser chemistry in the study of the dynamics of individual molecules (Almanac April 22, 1997).

Dr. Zewail was the sole recipient of the 1999 Nobel Prize in Chemistry (Almanac October 19, 1999). He was chosen for his establishment of the field of laser femtochemistry, which made it possible to “view” the motion of a chemical reaction and “view” molecules falling apart in real-time using light pulses lasting one thousand-million-millionth of a second, or a picosecond.

Dr. Zewail wrote hundreds of scientific papers and contributed to more than a dozen books.

He is survived by his wife, Dema Faham, and their four children.