Omar Yaghi, a chemist at the University of California, Berkeley, has been awarded the 2025 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. He shares the prize with Richard Robson from the University of Melbourne and Susumu Kitagawa from Kyoto University. The Nobel committee recognized their work on 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 now the 28th faculty member from UC Berkeley to receive a Nobel Prize and is the fifth recipient from the university in the past five years. Other recent UC faculty laureates include John Clarke (Physics, 2025), David Card (Economics, 2021), Jennifer Doudna (Chemistry, 2020), and Reinhard Genzel (Physics, 2020).
Currently holding the James and Neeltje Tretter Chair in the College of Chemistry and serving as co-director of the Kavli Energy NanoSciences Institute at UC Berkeley, Yaghi has played a key role in developing metal-organic frameworks (MOFs). These compounds are highly porous crystals that can absorb, store, and release gases and vapors. The versatility of MOFs allows them to be tailored for specific uses such as carbon dioxide capture or hydrogen storage.
In recent years, Yaghi’s research group has created MOFs that extract water from air in low-humidity environments. His laboratory’s work led to the development of compact water harvesters capable of producing up to five liters of water per day in arid conditions. He also founded Atoco in 2020 to use MOFs for climate change mitigation and improved access to drinking water.
Yaghi’s research extends beyond MOFs. He pioneered covalent organic frameworks (COFs), which are three-dimensional organic structures, and zeolitic imidazolate frameworks (ZIFs), which expand industrial catalyst capabilities. These materials have potential applications in energy storage and clean water delivery.
He refers to his area of study as “reticular chemistry,” which he defines as “stitching molecular building blocks into crystalline, extended structures by strong bonds.” Yaghi credits his mentor Walter Klemperer for teaching him rigorous scientific methods and encouraging innovation.
Describing his early work, Yaghi said: “There was no rationality in how you made these materials. There was no design, no intellectual rules or guidance for making them. 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.”
He explained how his team’s approach resulted in stable structures: “That basically was the spark that ignited the field. 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.”
Yaghi highlighted the significance of MOFs’ structure: “The metal clusters are at the corners of a scaffolding, like they put around a building. 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.”
He continued his work at several institutions before joining UC Berkeley in 2012. The impact of MOFs continues to grow with increasing scientific publications and commercial interest.
In 2022, Yaghi was named scientific director of the Bakar Institute of Digital Materials for the Planet at UC Berkeley. This institute uses artificial intelligence to develop new MOFs and COFs for climate change solutions.
He also established the Berkeley Global Science Institute to promote international scientific collaboration through research centers across several countries.
Born in Amman, Jordan, Yaghi moved to the United States as a teenager to pursue education. He earned his B.S. in chemistry from SUNY Albany and completed his Ph.D. at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His academic career includes positions at Arizona State University, the University of Michigan, UCLA, and UC Berkeley.
Yaghi’s achievements have been recognized by several major awards such as election to the National Academy of Sciences (2019), the Von Hippel Award (2025), Tang Prize in Sustainable Development (2024), VinFuture Prize (2021), Wolf Prize in Chemistry (2018), among others. He is also a member or honorary fellow of several national academies worldwide.
Yaghi lives in Berkeley, California.
