Gabor A. Somorjai was born in Budapest, Hungary, on May 4, l935. He was a fourth year student of Chemical Engineering at the Technical University in Budapest in l956 at the outbreak of the Hungarian Revolution. He left Hungary and emigrated to the United States, where he received his Ph.D. degree in Chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley in l960. He became a U.S. citizen in l962.
After graduation, he joined the IBM research staff in Yorktown Heights, New York, where he remained until l964. At that time, he was appointed Assistant Professor of Chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley. In l967, he was named Associate Professor, and in l972 promoted to Professor. Concurrent with his faculty appointment, he is also a Faculty Senior Scientist in the Materials Sciences Division, and Group Leader of the Surface Science and Catalysis Program at the Center for Advanced Materials, at the E.O. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
Professor Somorjai has educated more than 115 Ph.D. students and 200 postdoctoral fellows. He is the author of more than 1000 scientific papers in the fields of surface chemistry, heterogeneous catalysis, and solid state chemistry. He has written three textbooks, Principles of Surface Chemistry, Prentice Hall, l972; Chemistry in Two Dimensions: Surfaces, Cornell University Press, 1981; and Introduction to Surface Chemistry and Catalysis, Wiley-Interscience, 1994; and a monograph, Adsorbed Monolayers on Solid Surfaces, Springer-Verlag, l979.