Omar M. Yaghi

Omar Mwannes Yaghi (born 9 February 1965) is a Jordanian-American chemist of Palestinian origin, born in Amman to a refugee family from al-Masmiya. ^{1 2} He is best known for developing metal–organic frameworks and for pioneering reticular chemistry — assembling molecular building blocks into open, crystalline frameworks with strong bonds — and he shared the 2025 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Richard Robson and Susumu Kitagawa for this work. ¹ From 2012 to 2026 he was a professor at the University of California, Berkeley; in July 2026 he left to lead a newly established artificial intelligence and materials science institute at Tsinghua University in China. ¹

Omar Mwannes Yaghi was born in Amman on Tuesday 8 Shawwal 1384 AH, corresponding to 9 February 1965, to a Palestinian refugee family that had fled from Masmiya, a village in the Gaza district, during the 1948 Arab–Israeli War. ^{2 1} He grew up in a crowded household with many children, all living in a single room that also housed the family's livestock, with limited access to clean water. ¹

At fifteen, encouraged by his father, he moved to the United States knowing little English; he began at Hudson Valley Community College, graduating with an Associate of Science in 1983, transferred to the State University of New York at Albany for his chemistry BS in 1985, and earned his PhD at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign in 1990 under Walter G. Klemperer, followed by an NSF postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard (1990–1992) under Richard H. Holm. ¹ In 2021 he was granted Saudi citizenship by royal decree, alongside his Jordanian and American citizenships. ¹

Yaghi began as an assistant professor at Arizona State University (1992–1998), then held chairs at the University of Michigan (1999–2006) and at UCLA (2007–2012), before moving in 2012 to UC Berkeley as James and Neeltje Tretter Professor of Chemistry. ^{1 3} He directed the Molecular Foundry at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in 2012–13, is the founding director of the Berkeley Global Science Institute, an affiliate scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and a member of the US National Academy of Sciences and the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina. ¹ In May 2025 the University of California Board of Regents promoted him to University Professor, the system's highest rank, and in January 2025 he became the seventh president of the World Cultural Council. ¹

In July 2026 Yaghi vacated his Berkeley position to launch the Yaghi Science Initiative and take up a full-time chair professorship at Tsinghua University in China, leading an artificial intelligence laboratory dedicated to accelerating the discovery of new materials; he had been an honorary professor there since 2022 and a foreign member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences since 2025. ¹ Analysts and media outlets characterized the move as a significant indicator of shifting geopolitical dynamics in scientific research, driven by changing federal funding structures in the United States and expanded institutional recruitment by China. ¹

Yaghi is the pioneer of reticular chemistry, a field dedicated to assembling molecular building blocks into open, crystalline frameworks using strong bonds. ¹ He first proposed the approach in the early 1990s, when the scientific community considered it chemically unfeasible; in 1995 he successfully crystallized metal-organic structures in which metal ions are connected by charged organic linkers such as carboxylates via strong bonds, which led to the new class of materials known as metal–organic frameworks (MOFs) and marked the birth of reticular chemistry. ¹ He followed it with the introduction of metal-carboxylate clusters as secondary building units in 1998, giving robust frameworks with permanent porosity, and with the ultra-high-porosity MOF-5 in 1999. ¹

In 2005 he published the seminal paper on covalent organic frameworks (COFs), his group achieved the first 3D COFs in 2007, and he also pioneered zeolitic imidazolate frameworks (ZIFs) and the field of molecular weaving, with the first material woven at the atomic and molecular levels (COF-505). ¹ He has led efforts to apply reticular materials in clean energy technologies, including hydrogen and methane storage, carbon dioxide capture, and harvesting water from desert air using low-grade heat. ¹ According to a Thomson Reuters analysis he was the world's second-most-cited chemist between 2000 and 2010, and Saudipedia credits him with nearly two hundred scientific papers. ^{1 4}

In 2020 Yaghi founded Atoco, a California startup commercializing his MOF and COF advances for carbon capture and atmospheric water harvesting, and in 2021 he co-founded H2MOF, which applies his reticular-chemistry discoveries to hydrogen storage. ¹

His long list of international awards includes the Newcomb Cleveland Prize (2007), the King Faisal International Prize in Chemistry (2015), the Mustafa Prize in Nanoscience and Nanotechnology (2015), the Albert Einstein World Award of Science (2017), the Wolf Prize in Chemistry (2018), the Balzan Prize (2024) and the Great Arab Minds Award (2024). ^{1 3 4} On 8 October 2025 he received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, shared with Susumu Kitagawa and Richard Robson, "for the development of metal–organic frameworks". ^{4 1}

This section sets out positions as the sources report them; it is not a verdict by the museum. The main public discussion around him is his 2026 move from Berkeley to Tsinghua, which analysts and media outlets read as an indicator of shifting global balances in scientific research, as reported above; the museum records that characterization without adopting it. ¹ Older profiles, such as the Mustafa Prize laureate page, still show Berkeley as his current post because they predate the move; this record follows the updated English article on that point. ^{3 1} As to his school of Islam, no source consulted — neither the English nor the Arabic article, nor the Mustafa Prize page, nor Saudipedia — names a religion or a school, and a low-quality biography site giving only "Islam" is not a school attestation; his King Faisal and Mustafa prizes are scientific prizes, not attestations, so the value in his data remains unknown. ^{1 2 3}

• The defined source entities cited above, recorded in data/source/.
• Revisions of this article must be dated, and must name the source that changed each fact.