Optics and Photonics Research Faculty
Director, Laser Dynamics Laboratories
phone: 404-894-0292Optics + Photonics Research Area Affiliations
Research Summary
Dr. El-Sayed's research focuses on the study of the properties of plamonic (gold and silver) nanoparticles of different shapes, their interparticle coupling, and their applications in nanocatalysis and nanomedicine.
Biographical Sketch
Professor El-Sayed received his B.Sc. from Ain Shams U. Cairo, Egypt, and his Ph.D. from Florida State University. After being a research associate at Harvard, Yale, and the California Institute of Technology, he was appointed to the faculty of the University of California at Los Angeles in 1961. In 1994, Professor El-Sayed became the Julius Brown Chair, Regents’ Professor and Director of the Laser Dynamics Laboratory at the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry of the Georgia Institute of Technology.
He was an Alfred P. Sloan, John Simon Guggenheim fellow, a visiting professor at the University of Paris, a Sherman Fairchild distinguished scholar at California Institute of Technology, and a Senior Alexander von Humboldt fellow at the Technical University of Munich. He was a member of the Board of Trustees of Associated Universities, of the Advisory Board of the National Science Foundation, of the Division of Physical Chemistry of IUPAC, and was a chairman and a member at large of the US-NRC Committee for IUPAC. He has recently served on the Board of Chemical Science and Technology (NRC) and is now serving on the advisory committee of Basic Energy Sciences of DOE. He has been the Foreign Councilor of the Molecular Institute of Science in Okazaki, Japan. Professor El-Sayed was the Editor-in-Chief of The Journal of Physical Chemistry A and B and was an editor of the International Reviews of Physical Chemistry.
His research involves studying ultrafast dynamics in molecules, in amorphous and crystalline solid material in the bulk and on the nanometer length scale, as well as in photobiological systems. His studies involve ultrafast time resolved laser techniques. He has delivered over one hundred invited talks at national meetings and an equal number at international meetings. He has delivered over 35 special named lectures all over the U.S. and published over 425 papers, mostly in peer reviewed journals.
He received the Fresenius, the McCoy and the Harris Awards. He also received a number of the ACS Section Awards e.g. the California, the Southern California, the Florida, the Easter Tennessee (the Lind Medal) and the Northeastern (the Richards Medal). He also received the King Faisal International Award in Science, the UCLA Distinguished Teaching Award and gave the UCLA 1990 Faculty Research Lecture. He was a senior Alexander vonHumboldt fellow in Germany, a visiting professor in Paris, and is an honorary Professor at the University of Cairo, Egypt.
Professor El-Sayed is an elected member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and the Third World Academy of Science. He is also an elected Fellow of: the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
