UC Berkeley’s Omar Yaghi shares 2025 Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Omar Yaghi, a Jordanian-American chemist on the University of California, Berkeley, was awarded the 2025 Nobel Prize in Chemistry right now, sharing it with Richard Robson of the University of Melbourne, Australia, and Susumu Kitagawa of Kyoto University, Japan.

The scientists were cited for creating “molecular constructions with large spaces through which gases and other chemicals can flow. These constructions, metal-organic frameworks, can be used to harvest water from desert air, capture carbon dioxide, store toxic gases or catalyze chemical reactions.”

Yaghi is the twenty eighth UC Berkeley school member to win a Nobel Prize and the fifth winner previously 5 years. Yesterday, John Clarke shared the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics. In 2021, David Card shared the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, whereas in 2020, Jennifer Doudna shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, and Reinhard Genzel shared the Nobel Prize in Physics.

Yaghi is the James and Neeltje Tretter Chair within the College of Chemistry and co-director of the Kavli Energy NanoSciences Institute at UC Berkeley.

In the Nineties, Yaghi and his colleagues mixed metals with natural molecules to construct hybrid compounds which have a extremely porous crystal construction, one that may readily soak up, retailer and launch gases and vapors. He dubbed these compounds metal-organic frameworks, or MOFs, and proved that they don’t seem to be solely very steady structurally, however that they are often simply tuned, utilizing completely different metals and completely different natural linkers to seize particular molecules and exclude others.

To date, greater than 100,000 distinct MOF buildings have been synthesized, every with completely different properties tuned to a selected utility. Some, together with variations created by Yaghi, can seize carbon dioxide from flue gases produced by energy crops or trade. Others are used to pack methane into gasoline tanks to energy pure fuel autos. Still others can retailer hydrogen and will sometime equip hydrogen-fueled vehicles.

Within the previous couple of years, Yaghi has created MOFs that soak up water straight from the air, even on the low humidity typical of desert environments, and has integrated them right into a water harvester. Several years in the past, his lab spun off an organization to market small, microwave-sized water harvesters that may seize as much as 5 liters of water from the air per day in arid environments. And in 2020, he based one other firm, Atoco, to deploy MOFs to struggle local weather change and broaden entry to ingesting water.

He additionally pioneered two different massive courses of porous supplies: covalent natural frameworks, or COFs, that are the primary 3D natural prolonged buildings; and zeolitic imidazolate frameworks, or ZIFs, which vastly broaden the capabilities of zeolite catalysts in trade. These, too, may very well be helpful within the storage and separation of hydrogen, methane and carbon dioxide and in clear water manufacturing and supply. Because COFs have the added skill to retailer charged ions, they’ll additionally work as supercapacitors with doable functions in batteries or the automotive trade.

Reticular chemistry

Yaghi, 60, calls his discipline “reticular chemistry,” which he defines as “stitching molecular building blocks into crystalline, extended structures by strong bonds.”

The concept got here to him across the time he obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1990. There, he labored with chemist Walter Klemperer, who Yaghi mentioned taught him not solely “how to do rigorous science and the value of evidence in making your data analysis and conclusion,” but additionally “how to become a scientist that can break new ground in science, not somebody who follows other people’s discoveries.”

Yaghi had been engaged on the synthesis of complicated molecules by increase bigger molecules after which tearing them aside to get the specified construction, however he mentioned the outcome was “unsatisfactory.” Just as polymers are strings of similar molecules, he envisioned two-dimensional and even 3D polymers, like crystals, constructed from the identical molecular constructing blocks.

“There was no rationality in how you made these materials. There was no design, no intellectual rules or guidance for making them,” Yaghi mentioned. ”So I used to be fixated, as an assistant professor at Arizona State University in Tempe, on constructing supplies utilizing a constructing block method in order that I might rationally put these items collectively.”

After unsuccessfully trying to find completely natural crystalline buildings, he tried hybrids of inorganic metals and natural molecules. Earlier metal-organic compounds — coordination polymers, as they had been known as — had been exhausting to make use of as porous buildings as a result of they had been frail, however Yaghi and his college students at Arizona State tried a unique method. They created an inorganic cluster of two steel atoms — a dimetal carboxylase — and linked it with a normal natural molecule that may very well be ordered from a provide home. After many trials, Yaghi’s group was capable of create a steady, crystal-like construction with clusters of two steel atoms on the corners of a dice and the ligands between. He quickly achieved success with clusters of 4 steel atoms and confirmed that the buildings had been strong, steady in opposition to degradation and extremely porous.

“That basically was the spark that ignited the field,” he mentioned. “After that, anybody could take an inorganic cluster, link it with an organic ligand and make a porous crystal. You can functionalize the pores, do hydrogen storage, CO₂ capture, you can now capture water. And on top of all of that, you have thousands of inorganic building blocks that could be used and millions of organic units that could be used, and the combination would produce an infinite, truly infinite variety of structures that can not only be imagined, but can actually be made in the lab.”

One of a very powerful benefits of MOFs is that they’ve an unlimited floor space inside their pores: as a lot as 10,000 sq. meters per gram of MOF, the equal of two soccer fields. The big inner floor space permits a big quantity of fuel to stay, or adsorb. In addition, the steel and natural parts of an MOF might be adjusted to pick the kind of fuel adsorbed and the way tightly it sticks.

“The metal clusters are at the corners of a scaffolding, like they put around a building,” Yaghi mentioned. “At the intersection, people had put one metal ion. The new ones that we invented had clusters of metal ions that were large and allowed you to have flexibility on how they are linked. And above all else, they were not flimsy, they were not unsteady, like the ones made from single metal ions. The strong bonds between the metal clusters and charged organic linkers basically make the framework steady and robust.”

With MOFs, Yaghi primarily mixed the fields of natural chemistry — the chemistry of carbon compounds — and inorganic chemistry, which offers with the whole lot else, and prolonged these fields to 2D and 3D supplies. These MOFs had been extremely customizable. By adjusting the 2 constructing blocks, the scale and chemical setting of the pores contained in the MOF crystals may very well be tailor-made for a given utility.

By including enzymes to the inside of the pores, MOFs will also be tooled to catalyze reactions, resembling changing methane to methanol or breaking water into hydrogen and oxygen, offering clear vitality.

Yaghi’s preliminary experiences on MOFs had been met with skepticism and typically derision, he mentioned. But he had the assist of some chemists — key to a younger assistant professor simply beginning his profession — that stored him centered on the brand new discipline. He continued to work on MOFs after transferring to the University of Michigan in 1999, to UCLA in 2007 and to UC Berkeley in 2012.

The discipline has continued to develop, Yaghi mentioned. The variety of articles on MOFs in scientific journals balloons every year and has but to plateau. Dozens of corporations within the U.S. are pursuing analysis on MOFs, with functions starting from safer methods to retailer harmful chemical compounds to methods to create higher catalysts. He is among the many high 5 most extremely cited chemists worldwide

In 2022, Yaghi was appointed the scientific director of a brand new analysis heart at UC Berkeley, the Bakar Institute of Digital Materials for the Planet, which is able to make use of synthetic intelligence to develop cost-efficient, simply deployable variations of MOFs and COFs to assist restrict and handle the impacts of local weather change.

Yaghi is the founding director of the Berkeley Global Science Institute, which consists of a group of scientists and educators who work collectively to offer analysis alternatives for rising students around the globe. Through the institution of facilities of analysis excellence in Vietnam, Saudi Arabia, Japan, Jordan, South Korea, Argentina, Malaysia and Indonesia, the institute works to make sure that scientific analysis and innovation are carried out with out borders in a significant and impactful approach.

From Jordan to America

Yaghi was born in Amman, Jordan, in 1965 to oldsters who had been refugees from Palestine. His father raised cattle and owned a butcher store in Amman.

At the age of 15, he was instructed by his father that he should go to the U.S. to check and, inside the yr earlier than he graduated from highschool, he had obtained a visa and settled alone, in Troy, New York, to pursue his school schooling.

With a poor grasp of English, Yaghi took programs in English, math and science at Hudson Valley Community College in Troy earlier than transferring to the State University of New York at Albany in 1983.

“I was in love with chemistry from the very beginning,” Yaghi mentioned. “And when I moved to Albany, I immediately got into research. I was doing three different projects with three different professors at the same time: a physical organic project with one professor, a biophysical project with another and a theory project with a third professor. I really loved the lab. I disliked class, but I loved the lab.”

Supporting himself by bagging groceries and mopping flooring, he graduated in 1985 with a B.S. in chemistry cum laude and pursued a Ph.D., which he accomplished in 1990 on the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Following a National Science Foundation postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard University, he joined the school at Arizona State University in 1992, then on the University of Michigan in 1999 and, after that, at UCLA in 2007.

In 2012, he joined the chemistry school at UC Berkeley and have become director of the Molecular Foundry at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, a place he held till 2013. He is the founding director of the Berkeley Global Science Institute and co-director of the Kavli Energy NanoScience Institute and of the California Research Alliance by BASF.

Yaghi has acquired many honors for his analysis, together with election in 2019 to the National Academy of Sciences. In 2025, he acquired the Von Hippel Award, the best award of the Materials Research Society. In 2024, he acquired the Tang Prize in Sustainable Development and the Science for the Future Ernest Solvay Prize by Syensqo. In 2021, he acquired the VinFuture Prize for Outstanding Achievements in Emerging Fields, the AAAFM-Nakamura Prize International, the Ertl Lecture Award of the Fritz Haber Institute in Berlin and the Basolo Medal from Northwestern University, and he was named the Solvay Chair in Chemistry by Belgium.

He additionally acquired the 2020 August Wilhelm von Hofmann Denkmünze gold medal of the German Chemical Society for his contribution to reticular chemistry and the 2020 Royal Society of Chemistry Sustainable Water Award for his MOF-based water harvester.

Among his different awards are the 2019 Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences Gregori Aminoff Prize, the 2018 Wolf Prize in Chemistry, the 2018 Eni Energy Transition Award, the 2018 BBVA Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Basic Sciences, the 2015 King Faisal International Prize in Science, the 2009 American Chemical Society Award within the Chemistry of Materials and the 2007 Materials Research Society Medal.

Yaghi can be an elected member of the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Islamic World Academy of Sciences and the European Academy of Sciences. He is an elected honorary fellow of the Indian Academy of Sciences, an elected honorary member of the Turkish Academy of Sciences, an honorary member of the Jordanian National Academy of Science and Engineering, and a founding member of the Academy of Arab Scientists in Kuwait.

Yaghi, who’s an American citizen, lives in Berkeley, California.

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