The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced today the winners of the 2025 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, awarding three scientists, including Jordanian-American researcher Omar Yaghi, in recognition of their contributions to the development of advanced molecular structures capable of capturing and storing gases.
Yaghi shared the prize with Japanese scientist Susumu Kitagawa and British researcher Richard Robson after they revolutionized materials science by inventing what is known as “metal-organic frameworks” (MOFs), which are structures with tiny pores that have a unique ability to absorb and purify gases.
The Nobel Committee explained that this discovery paves the way for extensive scientific and industrial applications, such as collecting water from desert air, capturing carbon dioxide, storing toxic gases, and facilitating chemical reactions that open new horizons in the fields of energy and the environment.
Heiner Linke, the chair of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry, stated that these structures “represent a revolution in materials design,” noting that they empower scientists to “create compounds with unprecedented properties, tailored to specific needs and directed toward defined goals.”
For his part, Hans Elggren, the secretary-general of the Swedish Academy, confirmed that this technology “could provide practical solutions to the problem of global warming, by developing materials that separate carbon dioxide from the air or from factory emissions, and contribute to purifying water from toxic pollutants.”
Omar Yaghi, 60, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, is one of the most prominent chemists in the world and has been nominated for the Nobel Prize for several years due to his groundbreaking research in the field of porous materials. Susumu Kitagawa, 74, is a professor at Kyoto University in Japan, while Richard Robson, 88, works at the University of Melbourne in Australia.
