This Friday, Professor Ahmed Zewail is being honored at Caltech’s Science and Society Conference to address the most challenging problems facing the world and its future from medicine and space exploration to inequality and world economics.

Questions to be addressed include:  how to bridge the gap between rich and poor; can and should the body be engineered to live longer than our genes currently allow; what will startling advances in quantum mechanics mean for us.  

The professor will be recognized for his scientific contributions as well as his critical role in negotiating a peaceful resolution and transition to a new regime during the Egyptian Revolution in 2011.  

In 2009, President Obama appointed Zewail as US Science Envoy to the Middle East and Zewail also served as Science Advisor to the United Nations. In 1999, Zewail won the Nobel prize in chemistry for his contributions to femtochemistry, an area of physical chemistry that studies chemical reactions on extremely short time scales. Zewail developed a way to capture real-time movies of molecules as they meet and mate at speeds billions of times faster than the blink of an eye.

The Science and Society Conference featuring Ahmed Zewail and other Nobel Prize winners begins Friday, Feb. 25 at 9 a.m. at the Beckman Auditorium at the Caltech campus in Pasadena. Admission is free. For more information visit scienceandsociety.caltech.edu.  

Guest:

Ahmed Zewail, Nobel laureate in chemistry and Linus Pauling Professor of Chemistry and professor of physics at Cal-tech