UCLA - University of California - Los Angeles
10/08/2025 | Press release | Distributed by Public on 10/08/2025 08:36
Former UCLA faculty member Omar Yaghi wins 2025 Nobel Prize in chemistry
Omar M. Yaghi, a former professor of chemistry and biochemistry at UCLA who is currently the James and Neeltje Tretter Professor of Chemistry at UC Berkeley, has been awarded the 2025 Nobel Prize in chemistry.
Yaghi shares the honor with Susumu Kitagawa of Kyoto University and Richard Robson of the University of Melbourne for developing "a new form of molecular architecture" in which metal ions and carbon-based molecules are organized into highly porous, sponge-like structures known as metal-organic frameworks, or MOFs, that can be used to capture and store toxic gases, drive chemical reactions and even harvest water from desert air.
"Metal-organic frameworks have enormous potential, bringing previously unforeseen opportunities for custom-made materials with new functions," Heiner Linke, chair of the Nobel committee for chemistry said in a press release.
Yaghi, who conducted some of his most fruitful and groundbreaking Nobel-winning research at UCLA from 2006 to 2011, is known as the inventor of the field of reticular chemistry, a branch of science that deals with the linking of molecular building blocks into extended crystalline structures. He has designed and produced several new classes of crystalline materials, primarily for use in clean-energy applications.
Among those materials are MOFs that can efficiently store gasses like methane and hydrogen for possible use in alternative-fuel vehicles; covalent organic frameworks, or COFs; and zeolitic imidazolate frameworks, or ZIFs. These materials can isolate and capture carbon dioxide molecules and have shown great potential in reducing heat-trapping carbon dioxide emissions that contribute to global warming, rising sea levels and the increased acidity of oceans.
"[Yaghi] uses what we know about organic and inorganic reactivity to build up large compounds - macromolecules - but not ones that nature ever thought of; they are macromolecules conceived in the mind of Omar Yaghi," Albert Courey, former chair of the UCLA Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, said in 2009. "Omar's reticular compounds have potentially very important properties because they are very porous and because he is able to control their synthesis in such detail."
Reed Hutchinson / UCLA
Yaghi with structural models of his MOFs at UCLA.
MOFs, first created by Yaghi in the early 1990s, are like scaffolds made of linked rods with nanoscale pores that can trap carbon dioxide and other gasses that are usually difficult to store and transport. They can be made from low-cost ingredients, such as zinc oxide, a common ingredient in sunscreen, and terephthalate, which is found in plastic soda bottles, and their components can be changed nearly at will. Over the years, Yaghi and his colleagues have produced a broad array of MOFs with a variety of properties and structures.
During his time at UCLA, Yaghi and his team continuously improved on MOFs, COFs and ZIFs, increasing their porosity, their surface area and their capacity to compact and store carbon dioxide, hydrogen and methane. In 2010, one such structure, called MOF-200, broke the record for porosity.
Christopher Michel / Creative Commons
Yaghi in 2025.
"If I take a gram of [it] and unravel it, it will cover many football fields, and that is the space you have for gasses to assemble," Yaghi said at the time. "It's like magic. Forty tons of MOFs is equal to the entire surface area of California."
Yaghi's research also focused on achieving the goal of vehicles that run on hydrogen rather than gasoline. In 2006, he and his colleagues at UCLA and the University of Michigan used MOFs to achieve concentrations of hydrogen fuel nearly three times higher than had been reported previously.
"Many chemists believe that Yaghi's creations, if suitably tailored to store hydrogen, could lead to the first workable fuel tank for a hydrogen car," Popular Science wrote that year in naming Yaghi to its "Brilliant 10" list. "If you zoomed in a billion times, his substances would look like enormous scaffolds. Materials scientists had seen similar frameworks before, but they couldn't custom-build them for specific purposes."
At UC Berkeley, Yaghi is the scientific director of the Bakar Institute of Digital Materials for the Planet, founding director of the Berkeley Global Science Institute, and co-director of both the Kavli Energy NanoSciences Institute and the California Research Alliance by BASF.
Before joining UCLA's faculty in 2006, Yaghi was a faculty member at Arizona State University (1992-98) and the University of Michigan (1999-2006).
Eight UCLA faculty members have been named Nobel laureates: Willard Libby (chemistry, 1960), Julian Schwinger (physics, 1965), Donald Cram (chemistry, 1987), Paul Boyer (chemistry, 1997), Louis Ignarro (physiology or medicine, 1998), Lloyd Shapley (economics, 2012), J. Fraser Stoddart (chemistry, 2016) and Andrea Ghez (physics, 2020).
In addition, nine UCLA alumni have won the Nobel Prize: Fred Ramsdell (physiology or medicine, 2025), Ardem Patapoutian (physiology or medicine, 2021), Randy Schekman (physiology or medicine, 2013), Richard Heck (chemistry, 2010), Elinor Ostrom (economic sciences, 2009), William Sharpe (economic sciences, 1990), Bruce Merrifield (chemistry, 1984), Glenn Seaborg (chemistry, 1951) and Ralph Bunche (peace, 1950).
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