COFs and their cousin materials, metal organic frameworks (MOFs), are porous three-dimensional crystals with extraordinarily large internal surface areas that can absorb and store enormous quantities of targeted molecules. Invented by UC Berkeley's Professor Omar Yaghi, COFs and MOFs consist of molecules (organics for COFs and metal-organics for MOFs) that are stitched into large and extended netlike frameworks whose structures are held together by strong chemical bonds. Such frameworks show great promise for, among other applications, carbon sequestration.
The Wolf Prize in Chemistry has been awarded to The James and Neeltje Tretter Professor of Chemistry Omar M. Yaghi, University of California, Berkeley, for “pioneering reticular chemistry via metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) and covalent organic frameworks (COFs).”
Dr. Dominik Halter has been awarded a Feodor Lynen fellowship by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, to join the chemistry research group of Professor Jeffrey Long as a postdoctoral researcher. Halter’s research at Berkeley will focus on the development of new metal-organic frameworks with coordinatively unsaturated metal sites for hydrogen storage and catalysis.
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has awarded the 2019 Gregori Aminoff Prize in Crystallography to Michael O’Keeffe, Arizona State University, and Omar M. Yaghi, University of California, “for their fundamental contributions to the development of reticular chemistry”.
Based at UC Berkeley, BGSI is dedicated to developing fundamental science research in foreign countries aided by funds provided by local governments, industries, and institutions.