[1][8] After completing his PhD, Zewail did postdoctoral research at the University of California, Berkeley, supervised by Charles B.

[1] Following this, he was awarded a faculty appointment at the California Institute of Technology in 1976, and eventually became the first Linus Pauling Chair in Chemical Physics there.

In a speech at Cairo University on June 4, 2009, US President Barack Obama proclaimed a new Science Envoy program as part of a "new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world.

"[17] In January 2010, Ahmed Zewail, Elias Zerhouni, and Bruce Alberts became the first US science envoys to Islam, visiting Muslim-majority countries from North Africa to Southeast Asia.

[18]When asked about rumors that he might contest the 2011 Egyptian presidential election, Ahmed Zewail said: "I am a frank man...

I have no political ambition, as I have stressed repeatedly that I only want to serve Egypt in the field of science and die as a scientist.

Zewail said that he would join a committee for constitutional reform alongside Ayman Nour, Mubarak's rival at the 2005 presidential elections and a leading lawyer.

[7] Zewail gave his Nobel Lecture on "Femtochemistry: Atomic-Scale Dynamics of the Chemical Bond Using Ultrafast Lasers".

[25] In October 2006, Zewail received the Albert Einstein World Award of Science for "his pioneering development of the new field of femtoscience and for his seminal contributions to the revolutionary discipline of physical biology, creating new ways for better understanding the functional behavior of biological systems by directly visualizing them in the four dimensions of space and time.

[1] In 2005, the Ahmed Zewail Award for Ultrafast Science and Technology was established by the American Chemical Society and the Newport Corporation in his honor.

[36] In 2010 the journal Chemical Physics Letters established the Ahmed Zewail Prize in Molecular Sciences.