In Memoriam

Longtime ICTP friend Ahmed Zewail has passed away at age 70. A professor at the California Institute of Technology, Zewail won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1999, becoming the first Egyptian and Arab to do so. He founded a university for science and research outside of Cairo, named the  Zewail City of Science and Technology, which became an ICTP Affiliated Centre. As such, it received support from ICTP for research projects and graduate education.

In a personal essay he wrote for the ICTP publication One Hundred Reasons to be a Scientist, Zewail reflected on his life’s journey from his birth in a city on the banks of the Nile to attaining the highest honour for science: “I never expected that my portrait, next to the pyramids, would be on a postage stamp or that the school I went to as a boy and the road to Rosetta would be named after me. Certainly, I never dreamed that one day I would be honored with the Nobel Prize. But with passion and sincerity, It Is Possible, as human achievements should be limited neither by race nor by origin.”