Omar Yaghi

Omar Moenes Yaghi, a Saudi professor and scientist in the field of reticular chemistry, won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2025, as the first Saudi scientist to win the prize awarded by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. He founded the science of reticular chemistry and has received a number of awards and certificates of scientific recognition. 

Upbringing and education

At the age of fifteen, Omar Yaghi moved to the United States of America to continue his studies. He enrolled at Hudson Valley Community College, then earned a bachelor’s degree from the State University of New York in Albany, and subsequently moved on to graduate studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he received a PhD in Chemistry. In 1990, he was awarded a two-year postdoctoral fellowship from the National Science Foundation at Harvard University. 

Yaghi joined the faculty at Arizona State University between 1992–1998, then moved to the University of Michigan from 1999 to 2006, and then to the University of California, Los Angeles from 2007 to 2012. In 2012, he became the first to hold the James and Neeltje Tretter Chair of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of California, Berkeley, and a co-director of the Cal Institute for Nanoscale Science at the University of California, Berkeley, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. 

Achievements

Omar Yaghi developed innovative methods for synthesizing new materials and applying their uses, including incorporating biomolecules and capturing gases such as carbon dioxide and hydrogen. He developed synthetic strategies and intelligent designs. He was selected from among six thousand chemists as the second most-cited chemist for their work during 1998–2008. He has published nearly two hundred scientific papers that have been cited by other scientists about sixty thousand times.

Awards

Omar Yaghi has received a number of awards and certificates of scientific recognition, including the Exxon Award from the American Chemical Society in 1998, and the Sacconi Medal from the Italian Chemical Society in 2004, in recognition of his early achievements in designing and constructing new materials. Scientific circles also celebrated his achievements in hydrogen storage. In 2006, he was ranked among the ten smartest scientists and engineers in America. In 2007, the United States Department of Energy (Hydrogen Programme) awarded him its prize in recognition of his achievements in hydrogen storage, and he is the only recipient of the Materials Research Society Medal in recognition of his work in theorizing, designing, constructing and applying metal–organic frameworks with nanoporous cavities.

Omar Yaghi also received the Newcomb Cleveland Prize from the American Association for the Advancement of Science for the best research published in the renowned journal “Science” in 2007, and the American Chemical Society Award in 2009 in recognition of his achievements in materials chemistry. In 2015, he won the King Faisal Prize in Science for achieving fundamental accomplishments in the field of metal–organic frameworks. He won the Wolf Prize in Chemistry in 2018, and the Arab Geniuses Award in Natural Sciences in 2024.  

On October 8, 2025, Omar Yaghi won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for 2025, in recognition of his contributions to founding the science of reticular chemistry and developing metal–organic frameworks and covalent organic frameworks, which revolutionized materials science and opened new horizons for applications in clean energy, water and the environment.