Alexandria street scenes Statue of Dr. Ahmed Zawail, "father of femtochemistry". He was awarded the 1999 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on femtochemistry and became the first Egyptian to win a Nobel Prize in a scientific field, and the second African to win a Nobel Prize in Chemistry.Femtochemistry is the area of physical chemistry that studies chemical reactions on extremely short timescales in order to study the very act of atoms within molecules rearranging themselves to form new molecules.