Mostafa Amr El-Sayed is a physical chemist who has used lasers to study changing energy states in molecules; he is the Julius Brown Professor of Chemistry at the Georgia Institute of Technology. El-Sayed was one of the first to employ two-color lasers and ionization direction, and he has used laser technology to study the mechanism of photosynthetic systems. El-Sayed was born on May 8, 1933, in Zifta, a small town on the western branch of the Nile River in Egypt. He was the youngest of seven children born to Amr and Zakia (Ahmed) El-Sayed. His father was a high school mathematics teacher, and two of El-Sayed's strongest dreams were to become a university professor and to travel to the United States. In 1953, when El-Sayed completed his undergraduate studies at Ein Shams University in Cairo, he was offered his first teaching job. He began work as a chemistry instructor in the...