STOCKHOLM: King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden on Wednesday awarded American Saudi scientist Omar Yaghi the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his breakthrough development of metal-organic frameworks, a sponge-like structure that could store CO2 or harvest water from the air, alongside the British Australian and Japanese scientists Richard Robson and Susumu Kitagawa.
Yaghi, Robson and Kitagawa have each contributed over the past 50 years to developing scalable, reliable MOF models that can be deployed in industry to address climate-related issues and deliver clean air and water. They will share the $1.2 million prize.
Yaghi, 60, who grew up in a refugee camp in Jordan to a Palestinian family expelled from their property by Zionist militias in 1948, is the second Arab-born laureate to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
The Nobel Foundation said that MOFs, which are structures with large internal spaces, “can be used to harvest water from desert air, capture carbon dioxide, store toxic gases or catalyze chemical reactions.”
In 2015, Yaghi received the King Faisal International Prize for Chemistry, and in 2021, King Salman granted him Saudi citizenship for his scientific achievements. He holds the James and Neeltje Tretter Chair in Chemistry at UC Berkeley and is the founding director of the Berkeley Global Science Institute. In addition, Yaghi has branched into entrepreneurial activity since 2018, founding Atoco, which works on water harvesting and carbon capture, and co-founding H2MOF for hydrogen storage and WaHa Inc. for water harvesting with projects in the Middle East.
