While deciding which graduate school to attend, I had a conversation with Professor Ahmed Zewail. He explained that he wanted to be the first to measure the timing of fundamental chemical process such as bond formation and cleavage. Enthusiastically, I expressed my interest in building the lab to make those experiments possible. Since then, ultrafast lasers have enabled the observation of bond cleavage and bond formation as it occurs on a femtosecond timescale. Early work from my group focused on chemical reactions of neutral species in ground and excited states. More recently, our work has shifted to more exotic species far from equilibrium. For example, the fragmentation of doubly ionized radical cations leading to roaming of an H2 molecule and the formation of H3+. In addition to fundamental science related to chemical reaction dynamics and nonlinear optics, I have been involved in demonstrating the application of ultrafast lasers to biomedical imaging and standoff detection of explosives. My group has contributed to automating metrology and compression to achieve the theoretical Fourier-limit and facilitate the entry of ultrafast lasers into industrial applications. Finally, I will reflect on types of chemical reactions whose dynamics have yet to be explored with femtosecond time resolution, and present some of our latest efforts to provide such measurements.

Award Address (Ahmed Zewail Award in Ultrafast Science and Technology sponsored by the Ahmed Zewail Endowment Fund established by the Newport Corporation). Thirty-five years of work in ultrafast science and technology

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