The President of the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, Bettina Rockenbach, congratulates Omar M. Yaghi on this prestigious award: "This year's Nobel Prize in Chemistry honours groundbreaking scientific discoveries in the field of nanoporous materials, which have the potential to address pressing sustainability and environmental challenges. I am all the more delighted that a member of the Leopoldina has been honoured for his research achievements."
Omar M. Yaghi is one of the leading chemists in the field of materials science. He is being honoured for his innovative contributions to the discovery and development of nanoporous framework materials and for promoting their applications in carbon capture, hydrogen storage and water harvesting from desert air. By developing fundamental design principles and innovative synthesis methods, Yaghi created two extensive classes of nanoporous materials: metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) and covalent organic frameworks (COFs). These materials have the highest surface area known to date, making them particularly useful for applications such as hydrogen and methane storage, carbon capture and conversion, water harvesting from desert air, and catalysis. His chemical approach has enabled rapid growth in the development of new materials.
Omar M. Yaghi studied chemistry at the University at Albany/USA, and received his PhD in 1990 from the University of Illinois-Urbana in Champaign/USA. This was followed by a two-year postdoctoral phase at Harvard University/USA. In 1992, he worked as an assistant professor of chemistry at Arizona State University in Tempe/USA, where he remained until 1998. Omar M. Yaghi then moved to the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor/USA, where he taught as a professor of chemistry from 1999 to 2006. Between 2006 and 2011, he was a 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 of the Bakar Institute of Digital Materials for the Planet (BIDMaP) in Berkeley. Omar M. Yaghi has received numerous awards for his research. Among other honours, he received the Albert Einstein World Award of Science in 2017, the Wolf Prize in Chemistry in 2018 and the Balzan Prize from the International Balzan Foundation in 2024. Omar M. Yaghi has been a member of the US National Academy of Sciences since 2019 and a member of the Leopoldina in the Chemistry Section since 2022.
The Nobel Prize in Chemistry is currently endowed with a total of eleven million Swedish kronor (equivalent to around one million euros). All Nobel Prizes are traditionally presented to the winners on 10 December, the anniversary of the death of the founder Alfred Nobel.
The Leopoldina has around 1,700 members, now including 38 Nobel Prize winners.