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October 28, 1999 AWARD Nobel for alum BY LAURA SPADANUTA The Royal Swedish Academy of the Sciences has chosen Penn alumnus Ahmed Zewail (Gr’74) as recipient of the 1999 Nobel Prize in chemistry. Zewail, a native of Egypt who maintains both American and Egyptian citizenship, is being recognized for his studies of the step-by-step processes of chemical reactions. Chemistry Professor Robin Hochstrasser, under whom Zewail studied at Penn, said that Zewail’s work gives an “understanding of how these reactions work.” Zewail, a professor of chemistry and physics at California Institute of Technology, will receive the $960,000 award in Stockholm, Sweden, on Dec. 10. In a citation, the Royal Swedish Academy said, “Professor Zewail’s contributions have brought about a revolution in chemistry and adjacent sciences, since this investigation allows us to understand and predict important reactions.” Zewail began his prize-winning research in the late 1980s with experiments that led to the development of femtochemistry, a field that uses high-speed lasers to take pictures of molecules in the process of undergoing chemical reactions.