Gabor A. Somorjai

Gabor A. Somorjai (born 1935) is a Hungarian-born American chemist at the University of California, Berkeley, and a leading researcher in surface chemistry and catalysis. His work established that catalytic reactions on metal surfaces occur preferentially at surface defects rather than uniformly across a crystal face, a finding that reshaped understanding of heterogeneous catalysis. He received the Wolf Prize in Chemistry in 1998 and the National Medal of Science in 2001.