This article appeared in Catalyst Magazine, Spring 2026
Omar Yaghi joins a distinguished line of Berkeley scientists who have won chemistry’s highest honor.
On the morning of October 8, 2025, Omar Yaghi was changing planes in Brussels, on his way to a scientific conference, when his phone rang. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences was calling. By the time he stepped onto his next flight, he was a Nobel laureate.
"There is nothing like this, it's an astonishment," Yaghi told reporters later. Receiving the prize "is a feeling you don't have often."
It may not be a feeling that comes often for any one individual, but at Berkeley, Nobel Prizes are coming with some regularity. With Yaghi's win, the College of Chemistry claimed its second Nobel Prize in Chemistry in just five years, and Berkeley marked its 63rd Nobel laureate overall.
Chancellor Rich Lyons, speaking at a campus press conference the day of the announcement, credited Yaghi's success to his hard work, creativity, and willingness to challenge the status quo. "These are the things Nobel prizes are made of," Lyons said. "And these are the very attributes that define UC Berkeley."
Yaghi received the award along with co-recipients Richard Robson of the University of Melbourne, Australia, and Susumu Kitagawa of Kyoto University, Japan. The trio was selected for their pioneering work developing metal-organic frameworks, which are highly porous crystalline materials capable of trapping gases and vapors for applications in carbon capture, clean energy, and water harvesting.
The story of how Yaghi received his Nobel begins far from Latimer Hall. Born in Amman, Jordan, in 1965 to Palestinian refugee parents, Yaghi grew up with few resources. But he vividly recalls the day he snuck into an unlocked school library and pulled a random book off the shelf. Inside, an illustration of chemical structures piqued his interest, and he quickly became hooked on chemistry.
At 15, his father gave him a mandate: go to America to study. Within a year, Yaghi had a visa and was living alone in Troy, New York, enrolled at Hudson Valley Community College. He eventually earned his Ph.D. at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and did a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard. He joined the Berkeley chemistry faculty in 2012.
Yaghi doesn't take that pathway through science for granted.
"All my degrees have come from public schools," he said at the celebration in his honor. "I have always enjoyed attending as a student and working as a professor in these universities, and especially UC Berkeley, where the faculty are given full freedom to explore, fail, and succeed, and still we are being supported by our colleagues and our administrators."
The story of MOFs begins with Robson, who demonstrated in 1989 that metal ions and multitopic organic ligands could self-assemble into extended, porous crystal structures. But early versions of the materials collapsed easily and were hard to use in any applied way. As an early-career scientist, Yaghi developed the more rigid framework—using inorganic metal clusters rather than single metal ions—that would go on to be more useful. He showed that different building blocks could lead to different geometry and chemistry. Today, more than 100,000 distinct MOF structures have been synthesized worldwide.
The applications of these crystalline structures span global scientific challenges: capturing CO₂ from smokestacks, storing hydrogen for vehicles, and harvesting drinking water directly from desert air. Yaghi's lab spun off a company to commercialize the use of MOFs for water harvesting and founded another company to use MOFs in the fight against climate change and access to drinking water.
What excites Yaghi as much as the applications themselves is the field's fundamental accessibility.
"If you can think it, you can make it," Yaghi has said. "If you can think up a material that you want, whether you're a startup, or a professor, or an emerging student trying to learn chemistry, you can actually go to the lab and make it."
A Run of Nobels
Omar Yaghi, interviewed by media upon arriving at his campus celebration.
In 2020, Jennifer Doudna, a Berkeley professor of chemistry and molecular and cell biology, shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the co-discovery of CRISPR-Cas9. This gene-editing technology has transformed biology and medicine and opened new possibilities in treating genetic diseases.
"This is a quintessential story about Berkeley," Doudna said in 2025 when speaking about her Nobel-winning work. "The research that I'll talk about today wouldn't have happened ... if I had been working anywhere else. And that's because we have a really collaborative environment on our campus."
Two years later, Carolyn Bertozzi, who spent nearly two decades on the Berkeley chemistry faculty before moving to Stanford, shared the 2022 Nobel Prize for the development of bioorthogonal chemistry. These reactions can be carried out in living cells without disrupting normal biological function, opening new avenues in basic biochemistry and drug delivery.