ASU Science Lectureship to Feature Nobel Prize Winner
March 03, 2010
Zewail’s talk, titled “Time’s Mysteries and Miracles,” will begin at 8 p.m. March 11 in the C.J. Davidson Conference Center inside the ASU Houston Harte University Center, 1910 Rosemont Drive. Prior to the evening lecture, Zewail will also meet with ASU students to discuss “Seeing in Four Dimensions” at 2 p.m. Both lectures are open free to the public.
A native of Egypt, Dr. Ahmed Zewail is the Linus Pauling Professor of Chemistry and a professor of physics at California Institute of Technology (Caltech). He began working with Pauling, a legendary chemist, at about the same time Pauling presented one of the first WTMA lectureships at ASU in 1978.
In the late 1980s, Zewail and his research team literally changed the view of the dynamics of matter and created the new discipline of femtoscience, making it possible to observe the movement of individual atoms in a femtosecond (one quadrillionth of a second). He was awarded the 1999 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, and will be the 12th Nobel Prize winner to deliver the WTMA lectureship.
Over the past seven years, Zewail has established a new field of research and founded the multi-disciplinary Physical Biology Center for Ultrafast Science and Technology at Caltech. This is a new integrated science of structure and dynamics, with the aim of deciphering the fundamental physics of chemical and biological behavior, from atoms to cells. His new research began following his breakthrough development of 4-D imaging, or visualization, of molecular and cellular systems directly in the four dimensions of space and time. The primary goal of the research is to understand the complexity of materials and biological function.
The WTMA lectureship honors Dr. Roy E. Moon, a longtime San Angelo obstetrician and gynecologist, who died in 1976. He practiced for 28 years with Clinic Hospital Medical Associates, now West Texas Medical Associates. The lectureship was established in 1976 and is underwritten by a grant to ASU from members of WTMA.