Climate Change

Omar Yaghi wins BBVA Frontiers of Knowledge Award in the Basic Sciences

January 23, 2018

Omar YaghiThe BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in the Basic Sciences category goes, in this tenth edition, to Jordanian-American chemist Omar Yaghi, “for his pioneering work in the conception and synthesis of new...

Water harvester delivers fresh water from air

June 8, 2018


Markus Kalmutzki, Farhad Fathieh and Eugene Kapustin set up the water harvester. (Stephen McNally photo)A UC Berkeley team headed by Omar Yaghi plopped their newest prototype water harvester into the backyard of a tract home in Arizona and started sucking water out of the air without any power other than sunlight.

Professors Omar Yaghi and Evelyn Wang awarded international water prize

June 21, 2018


Yaghi and Wang awarded international water prizeThe team of Professors Omar Yaghi (UC Berkeley) and Evelyn Wang (MIT) have won the Alternative Water Resources prize, which will be awarded at the United Nations Headquarters in New York City.

Atmospheric harvesters will enable arid nations to drink from thin air

May 3, 2018

Omar YaghiA newly developed sorbent-based alternative has recently shown that it can harvest atmospheric moisture even when the relative humidity drops to around 10 percent. Under those conditions, that works out to around three liters of water for every million...

UC Berkeley celebrates earth week

April 21, 2018

Night shot of the earthCelebrate earth week by getting involved. Student Environmental Resource Center (SERC) and Environmental & Sustainability Student Organizations have developed lots of ways to get involved. View the schedule here.

Sewage sludge leads to biofuels breakthrough

March 26, 2018

Jewel Lake, Tilden Park Berkeley. Photo ChickMarkley.JBEI enzyme discovery enables first-time microbial production of an aromatic biofuel.

The study was led by Harry Beller, Berkeley Lab senior scientist and scientific...

Omar Yaghi

The James and Neeltje Tretter Professor of Chemistry

email: yaghi@berkeley.edu
office: 602 Latimer Hall
phone: 510-643-5507
lab: 636 Latimer Hall
lab phone: 510- 643-3591

Research Group

Research Description

We are developing the science of building chemical structures from molecular building blocks; a field we refer to as Reticular Chemistry. It is concerned with linking of molecular building blocks (organic molecules, inorganic clusters,...

Artificial leaves to produce fuel on Earth and, one day, Mars

January 24, 2018

Matt Damon, Mars movieWith the right technology, the gas station of the future will make its own fuel directly from sunlight, in the process sucking up carbon and producing oxygen. Decades into the future, the same technology could provide fuel and oxygen for the first Martians, and could even be tweaked to produce fertilizer....