(Photo by Brittany Hosea-Small)The making of a Nobel Prize
Omar Yaghi’s career has been defined by a bold vision: that you can “stitch” simple molecular building blocks to form porous structures, which can then be used to solve real-world problems. It’s a concept that has reshaped chemistry and inspired a generation of researchers. Last fall, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences recognized that impact by awarding Yaghi the 2025 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
Yaghi, a UC Berkeley professor of chemistry with appointments in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering and the College of Computing, Data Science and Society, shared the prize with Richard Robson of the University of Melbourne, Australia, and Susumu Kitagawa of Kyoto University, Japan. Together, they were recognized for creating metal-organic frameworks (MOFs). These molecular constructions can be used to harvest water from desert air, capture carbon dioxide, store toxic gases or catalyze chemical reactions.
For Yaghi, the award marks both a scientific breakthrough and a personal triumph. Born in Amman, Jordan, to Palestinian refugees, Yaghi had discovered his passion for chemistry at an early age. Then, at age 15, his father told him that he must go to the United States to study.
College-bound, Yaghi soon arrived in New York, alone and with limited English skills. Working his way through school, bagging groceries and mopping floors, he eventually earned a B.S. in chemistry from the State University of New York at Albany, where he also got heavily involved in research. This was followed by a Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a National Science Foundation postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard University. He joined the Berkeley faculty in 2012, having worked previously at Arizona State University, University of Michigan and UCLA.
In the early 1990s, Yaghi and his colleagues made a breakthrough that led to the invention of the first MOFs. They combined metals with organic molecules to build hybrid compounds with a highly porous crystal structure, one that can readily absorb, store and release gases and vapors. He then proved that MOFs are not only very stable structurally, but that they can be easily tuned, using different metals and different organic linkers to capture specific molecules and exclude others.
Through this pioneering work, Yaghi created a new field called reticular chemistry, which he defines as “stitching molecular building blocks into crystalline, extended structures by strong bonds.”
To date, more than 100,000 distinct MOF structures have been synthesized, each with different properties tuned to a specific application. Some, including versions created by Yaghi, can capture carbon dioxide from flue gases produced by power plants or industry. Others are used to pack methane into fuel tanks to power natural gas vehicles. Still others can store hydrogen and may someday equip hydrogen-fueled cars. Within the last few years, Yaghi has created MOFs that absorb water directly from the air, even at the low humidity typical of desert environments, and has incorporated them into a water harvester.
He has also pioneered two other large classes of porous materials: covalent organic frameworks, or COFs, and zeolitic imidazolate frameworks, or ZIFs, which also could be useful in the storage and separation of hydrogen, methane and carbon dioxide and in clean water production and delivery. Because COFs have the added ability to store charged ions, they can also work as supercapacitors with possible applications in batteries or the automotive industry.
With this honor, Yaghi joins a long tradition of Nobel-caliber discovery at Berkeley as its 28th faculty Nobel laureate, and the fifth in just the past five years.
Learn more: UC Berkeley’s Omar Yaghi shares 2025 Nobel Prize in Chemistry (Berkeley News); Record-breaking “molecular sponge” pulls carbon from air faster than ever before (BIDMap)