I wish school career advisers were more aware of horticulture. They imagine it's just going out into public parks and pulling weeds up, not a career. But there is garden design, horticultural research, conservation – a whole gamut of angles which are overlooked.

Never take advice from anyone with no investment in the outcome.

I have never felt the need to trash talk, and I'm not going to start now! I just quietly do my job and then quietly step into the ring to showcase what I can do. And one thing is for sure: I'm going to leave it all in the ring. I've always had such a will to win, and I always give my heart and my soul, so I don't need to change who I am.

I would come home and ask my mother, my father, my grandparents, my great-grandparents, 'Why?'. And they would say, 'That's the way it is. Don't get in the way, don't get in trouble!'

I like simplicity. To me, this is very, very important, whether I am dealing with science or dealing with people.

I have had students and postdocs of the first class close to four hundred people.

The great singer Um Kulthum (actually named Kawkab Elsharq – a superstar of the East) had a major influence on my appreciation of music. On the first Thursday of each month we listened to Um Kulthum's concert – "waslats" (three songs) – for more than three hours. During all of my study years in Egypt, the music of this unique figure gave me a special happiness, and her voice was often in the background while I was studying mathematics, chemistry… etc. After three decades I still have the same feeling and passion for her music.

Today I was reading the latest issue of Nature, and somebody had written an editorial that said scientists should be basically directing their work to the service of society by making the discoveries that are relevant. The problem is I don’t know what’s relevant!

We started at Caltech asking very simple questions: how do we understand the molecule dynamics or the dynamics of molecules, emotions and so on, molecules but in a coherent fashion.

I am not one of the new media experts working all the time with my computers and the PowerPoint’s and things of that sort. So, I’m an old fashioned still in this regard but these are the moment where I really can be creative, if I am, to be left alone with just a book and piece of paper and to be thinking.