2007-9-14

Yuan Tseh Lee was born in Hsinchu, Taiwan on November 29, 1936, and his father was a painter. Lee graduated from Taiwan University in 1959 and then went to the Hsinchu Tsinghua University for graduate study and received his Master's degree. In 1962, he went to the University of California, Berkeley, USA and received his Doctoral degree in 1965. After that, he went to the Department of Chemistry at Harvard University, worked with D. Herschbach in the Molecular Reaction Dynamics studies. In 1968, he was named as teaching assistant of the Department of Chemistry, University of Chicago; in 1971 as an associate professor and in 1973, he became a professor. After 1974, he was named as professor of the Department of Chemistry, the University of California, Berkeley, concurrently as Senior Director Researcher of the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory. In 1979, he was elected as an Academician of the National Academy of Sciences, USA. In 1980, he was elected as an Academician of the Taiwan Academia Sinica. In 1994, he went back to Taiwan, named as the President of the Taipei Academia Sinica, and retired in October 2006.

Lee was mainly engaged in the research of Chemical Dynamics and has made great achievements in chemical kinetics, dynamics, molecular beam and photochemical. In 1986, he won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for "his invention of crossed molecular beam method, which enables detailed understanding of the chemical reaction process to become possible, and has made contribution in the study of the new area of chemistry - reaction kinetics ". He also won the National Science Award of the USA.