Nobel Prize Chinese Americans Winners 

Yuan Tseh Lee

Date of Birth:	February 1 or 9, 1936
Place of Birth:	Hsinchu, Taiwan, China
Came to the U.S.	1962
Received Ph.D.:	1965
U.S. citizenship:	1974
Nobel Prize:	1986 in chemistry

	Since 1974, Dr. Lee has been a professor of chemistry and a principle investigator at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory of the University of California.   In 1986, he shared the Nobel Chemistry Prize for "contributions concerning the dynamics of elementary chemical processes." In his study, Dr. Lee used a universally applicable, specially designed mass spectrometer to separate and identify reaction products.   His laboratory now uses seven sophisticated molecular beam apparati to investigate reaction dynamics, photochemical processes, and molecular spectroscopy.

	Honors: Sloan Fellow, 1969; Dreyfus Scholar, 1971; Fellow of the Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1975 and American Physical Society, 1976; Guggenheim Fellow, 1977; a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, 1979; a member of the Academy Sinica, Taiwan, China, 1980; Honorary Professor, Institute of Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Science, Beijing, China 1980; Miller Professor, University of California at Berkeley, 1981; Fairchild
Distinguished Scholar, California Institute of Technology, 1983;  Honorary Professor, Chinese University of Science and Technology, Hefei, Anhui, China, 1986;  E.O. Lawrence Award, U.S. Department of Energy, 1981; Harrison Home Award, 1983; Peter Debye Award of Physical chemistry, American Chemical Society, 1986; National Medal of Science, 1986;  and Honorary Doctor of Science degree, University of Waterloo, England, 1986.

	Yuan Tseh Lee's father was an artist and his mother a school teacher.  He started his early education while Taiwan was under Japanese occupation.  His elementary education was disrupted soon after it started during World War II while the city populace was relocated to the mountains to avoid the daily bombing by the Allies.  It was not until after the war when Taiwan was returned to China that he was able to attend school normally as a third grader. In the elementary school, he was a member of baseball team and ping-pong team which won the little league championship in Taiwan.  He was an avid and serious reader on science, literature, and social science.   The biography of Madam Curie made a strong impact on him. In 1955, his excellent academic record in high school admitted him to the National Taiwan University without taking the entrance examination.   After his Bachelor of Science degree in 1959, he went to the National Tsinhua University for graduate work, and completed his Master of Science degree there in 1961.

	Yuan Tseh Lee entered the University of California at Berkeley as a graduate student in 1962, and worked under the late Professor Bruce Mahan on chemi-ionization processes of electronically excited alklai atoms. He became interested in ion-molecule reactions and the dynamics of molecular scattering, especially the crossed molecular beam studies of reaction dynamics.  Upon receiving his Ph.D. in 1965, he stayed in Mahan's group and started to work on ion-molecule reactive scattering experiments using ion beam techniques measuring energy and angular distributions.  In one year, he learned to design and construct a scattering apparatus and carried out experiments in obtaining a complete product distribution contour map, a remarkable accomplishment at the time.

	In February 1967, Dr. Lee joined Professor Dudley Herschbach at Harvard University as a post-doctoral fellow. He spent half of his time working on the reactions of hydrogen atoms and diatomic alkali molecules, and other half of his time on the construction of a universal crossed molecular beam apparatus.   He accepted the position of an assistant professor in the department of Chemistry and the James Franck Institute of the University of Chicago in October 1968. He was promoted to associate professor in October 1971 and professor in January 1973.  In 1974, Dr. Lee returned to Berkeley as a professor in chemistry and a principle investigator at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory of the University of
California, He became the an American citizen in the same year.  His
design and construction of a new generation, the state-of-art crossed beam
apparatus, enable him to carry out many exciting and pioneering
experiments on elementary reactions, which led to his winning of the Nobel
Prize in 1986.