Omar Yaghi

Omar M. Yaghi was born in 1965 in Jenin, in the Jordanian-administered West Bank, later Palestine. Growing up in Jordan, he developed an early fascination with science that would eventually lead him to reshape an entire branch of chemistry. He emigrated to the United States for his higher education, earning his bachelor's degree from the State University of New York at Albany in 1985 and his doctorate in inorganic chemistry from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1990 under the supervision of Walter Klemperer.

After postdoctoral work at Harvard University, Yaghi held faculty positions at Arizona State University, the University of Michigan, and UCLA before joining the University of California, Berkeley, where he is now a professor of chemistry and co-director of the Kavli Energy NanoSciences Institute.

Yaghi is credited as the father of an entirely new field: reticular chemistry, the science of stitching molecular building blocks into extended, crystalline, porous structures by design. His group synthesized the first metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) in the 1990s — crystalline solids with internal surface areas so vast that a single gram can contain a surface equivalent to several football fields. These engineered nano-pores can store, separate, and transform gases with extraordinary precision.

The applications are transformative: MOFs can capture carbon dioxide directly from the air, store hydrogen fuel for clean energy vehicles, purify water from atmospheric moisture even in arid regions, and deliver drugs inside the body. Yaghi's group also developed covalent organic frameworks (COFs) and zeolitic imidazolate frameworks (ZIFs), expanding the reticular chemistry toolkit.

His work has earned him numerous prestigious awards, including the King Faisal International Prize, the Wolf Prize in Chemistry, and the BBVA Frontiers of Knowledge Award. He is widely regarded as one of the most cited chemists in the world and a leading candidate for the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.