Yuan T. Lee Biography

Yuan Tseh Lee is a chemist who became the first Taiwanese to win the Nobel Prize when he, along with the Hungarian-Canadian John C. Polanyi and American Dudley R. Herschbach won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1986 for their groundbreaking work in chemical elementary processes. Lee had specifically worked on the use of advanced chemical kinetics techniques to investigate the behaviour of chemical reactions. Bright and intelligent from a young age, he performed brilliantly in academics as a student. He was also an athletic youngster and played several sports including tennis and baseball. Due to his glowing academic records in high school he was easily accepted into the prestigious National Taiwan University even without having to take the entrance examination. After completing his graduation, he earned an M.S. from the National Tsing Hua University and moved on to the University of California, Berkeley for his doctoral research. He started working with fellow chemist Dudley Herschbach at Harvard University and the two men worked with molecular beams, performing so-called "crossed molecular beam" experiments, among other things. Lee experimented with and further developed Herschbach’s technique and introduced mass spectroscopy to identify the products resulting from the reactions of oxygen and fluorine atoms with complex organic compounds. He has also been honored with several other international awards in addition to the Nobel Prize for his invaluable contributions to the field of chemistry