Omar Yaghi, a chemist at the University of California, Berkeley, has been awarded the 2025 Nobel Prize in chemistry. He shares the honor with Richard Robson from the University of Melbourne and Susumu Kitagawa from Kyoto University. The Nobel Committee recognized their work 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 28th UC Berkeley faculty member to win a Nobel Prize and is the fifth winner at the university in the past five years. He holds the James and Neeltje Tretter Chair in the College of Chemistry and serves as co-director of the Kavli Energy NanoSciences Institute at UC Berkeley.
In the 1990s, Yaghi and his colleagues developed metal-organic frameworks (MOFs), hybrid compounds formed by combining metals with organic molecules. These structures are highly porous and can absorb, store, and release gases and vapors. Yaghi named these compounds MOFs and demonstrated their stability and tunability, which allows them to be used for capturing specific molecules.
More than 100,000 distinct MOF structures have now been synthesized, each suited for different applications. Some can capture carbon dioxide from industrial emissions, while others are used for storing methane or hydrogen for fuel applications. Recently, Yaghi’s research has focused on MOFs that can extract water from air in low-humidity environments. His lab has commercialized a device that captures up to five liters of water per day from the air in arid regions. In 2020, he founded Atoco, a company aimed at deploying MOFs to address climate change and improve access to drinking water.
Yaghi also pioneered covalent organic frameworks (COFs) and zeolitic imidazolate frameworks (ZIFs), which are new classes of porous materials useful in gas storage, separation, clean water production, and as supercapacitors for energy storage.
Describing his field as “reticular chemistry,” Yaghi explained it as “stitching molecular building blocks into crystalline, extended structures by strong bonds.” He credits his mentor Walter Klemperer at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign for teaching him scientific rigor and encouraging innovation.
Yaghi’s approach was to build materials using a rational design, combining inorganic clusters with organic molecules to create stable, porous crystals. This led to significant advances in materials science, including structures that have surface areas up to 10,000 square meters per gram.
He noted, “There was no rationality in how you made these materials. There was no design, no intellectual rules or guidance for making them,” and added, “So I was fixated, as an assistant professor at Arizona State University in Tempe, on building materials using a building block approach so that I could rationally put these things together.”
Yaghi’s innovations have led to widespread adoption in both academic research and industry, with dozens of companies exploring MOF applications ranging from chemical storage to catalysis. He is among the most highly cited chemists globally.
In 2022, he became the scientific director of the Bakar Institute of Digital Materials for the Planet at UC Berkeley, which focuses on using artificial intelligence to develop MOFs and COFs for environmental applications.
Yaghi is also the founding director of the Berkeley Global Science Institute, an organization that supports research opportunities for scholars worldwide by establishing centers in several countries.
Born in Amman, Jordan, in 1965 to Palestinian refugee parents, Yaghi moved to the United States as a teenager to pursue education. He studied at Hudson Valley Community College and the State University of New York at Albany before earning his Ph.D. at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1990. His career has included faculty positions at Arizona State University, the University of Michigan, UCLA, and UC Berkeley.
Yaghi has received numerous honors, including election to the National Academy of Sciences in 2019, the Von Hippel Award in 2025, the Tang Prize in Sustainable Development in 2024, and several international prizes recognizing his contributions to chemistry and materials science.
He is an elected member or honorary fellow of multiple scientific academies worldwide and lives in Berkeley, California.
For more details on Omar Yaghi’s work and impact on chemistry and sustainability, readers can refer to additional resources available on the Nobel website and his laboratory site.
