Omar M. Yaghi is a leading chemistry expert in the field of material sciences. He has received the prize for his groundbreaking contributions to the discovery and development of nanoporous framework materials, and advancing their applications in carbon capture, hydrogen storage, and water harvesting from desert air. By developing foundational design principles and innovative synthetic methods, Yaghi has created two extensive classes of nanoporous materials: metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) and covalent organic frameworks (COFs). These materials have the highest surface areas known to date, which makes them especially useful, for example, for hydrogen and methane storage, carbon binding and transformation, water harvesting from desert air, and catalysis. His approach to chemistry has led to an exponential growth in the development of new materials.
Having studied chemistry at the University at Albany/USA, Omar M. Yaghi completed his doctorate at the University of Illinois-Urbana in Champaign/USA in 1990. This was followed by a two-year postdoctoral phase at Harvard University/USA. In 1992 he took up the position of Assistant Professor of Chemistry at Arizona State University in Tempe/USA, where he remained until 1998. Omar M. Yaghi then switched to the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor/USA, where he was Professor of Chemistry from 1999 to 2006. From 2006 to 2011 he was Professor of Chemistry at the University of California in Los Angeles/USA. Since 2012 he has been Professor of Chemistry at the University of California in Berkeley/USA, where he continues to research and teach, and since 2022 he has also been Co-Director at Berkeley’s Bakar Institute of Digital Materials for the Planet (BIDMaP).
Omar M. Yaghi has already received multiple awards for his research, including the Albert Einstein World Award of Science in 2017, the Wolf Prize in Chemistry in 2018, and the Gregori Aminoff Prize from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in 2019. In addition, he has been a highly cited researcher in the field of chemistry since 2014 and currently holds an H-index of 177. Since 2019 Omar M. Yaghi has been a member of the US National Academy of Sciences, and he has been a member of the Leopoldina in the Chemistry Section since 2022.
The International Balzan Prize Foundation awards the Balzan Prize annually. It honours particularly innovative research in the humanities and social sciences, art, the natural sciences, mathematics, and medicine. The Balzan Prize is awarded in four categories. This year’s recipients also include the Leopoldina Member Lorraine Daston, whose achievements were honoured in the History of Modern and Contemporary Science category. The prize is endowed with 750,000 Swiss francs per category. Half the prize money is to be invested in research projects which, preferably, involve young researchers.