On Mar. 15, 2016,  the American Chemical Society awarded the Priestley Medal to Mostafa A. El-Sayed  “to recognize distinguished services to chemistry,” the American Chemical Society’s most prestigious award. For nearly 60 years, El-Sayed, a Regents’ Professor and the Julius Brown Chair at Georgia Institute of Technology, conducted highly acclaimed chemistry research and served as a chemistry educator and journal editor.

Mostafa El-Sayed studied chemistry at Ain Shams University, Cairo, Egypt, and at Florida State University, Tallahassee, USA, where he received his Ph.D. under the supervision of Michael Kasha in 1958. After postdoctoral research at Yale University, New Haven, CT, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, and the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, all USA, he joined the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1961. In 1994, he moved to the Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, USA, where his current position is Regents’ Professor and Julius Brown Chair.

Among other honors, Professor El-Sayed received the King Faisal International Prize in 1990, the Irving Langmuir Award in Chemical Physics from the ACS in 2002, and the Ahmed Zewail Prize in Molecular Sciences in 2009. He is a former Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Physical Chemistry and currently a member of the Editorial Advisory Board of ChemPhysChem.