Rate My Professor Mostafa El-Sayed

Mostafa El-Sayed is Regents’ Emeritus Professor in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He earned his B.Sc. in chemistry from Ain Shams University, Cairo, Egypt, in 1953, and his Ph.D. from Florida State University. After postdoctoral fellowships at Yale University (1958-1959), Harvard University (1959-1960), and the California Institute of Technology (1960-1961), he joined the University of California, Los Angeles, as assistant professor in 1961, becoming associate professor in 1964 and full professor in 1967, a position he held until 1994. In 1994, he was appointed Julius Brown Professor at Georgia Tech, elevated to Regents Professor in 2000, and now holds emeritus status. El-Sayed directed the Laser Dynamics Laboratory, established in 1996, which houses advanced laser spectroscopic equipment for time-resolved studies.

His research specializes in nanoscience and nanotechnology within chemistry, focusing on the synthesis, properties, and applications of nanomaterials of different shapes. Key areas include ultrafast electron-hole dynamics in semiconductor nanoparticles, shape-controlled synthesis and stability of metallic nanoparticles, enhanced light absorption, scattering, electronic relaxation, and photothermal properties of gold and silver nanocrystals. Applications encompass nanomedicine for diagnostics and selective photothermal therapy of cancer, nanocatalysis with shape-dependent activity, and plasmonics. He served as Editor-in-Chief of The Journal of Physical Chemistry from 1980 to 2004. El-Sayed is an elected member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (1980), American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1986), and received the National Medal of Science (2007), Priestley Medal (2016), King Faisal International Prize in Chemistry (1990), Irving Langmuir Award (2002), Ahmed Zewail Prize (2009), and Glenn T. Seaborg Medal (2009), among others. Notable publications include "Chemistry and properties of nanocrystals of different shapes" (Chemical Reviews, 2005), "Cancer cell imaging and photothermal therapy in the near-infrared region by using gold nanorods" (Journal of the American Chemical Society, 2006), "Noble metals on the nanoscale: optical and photothermal properties and some applications in imaging, sensing, biology, and medicine" (Accounts of Chemical Research, 2008), and "Shape-controlled synthesis of colloidal platinum nanoparticles" (Science, 1996). His over 700 publications have exceeded 150,000 citations.