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Omar Yaghi
born 1965 · United States, Jordan · Contemporary
Nobel Chemistry 2025
Made stable metal–organic frameworks and showed they can be designed rationally, founding reticular chemistry.
Nobel Prize work
Yaghi created the first permanently porous metal–organic frameworks, proving with MOF-5 in 1999 that metal ions and organic linkers can be joined into crystals that keep their porosity after guest molecules are removed. He extended this approach into covalent organic frameworks and founded reticular chemistry, which now underpins applications from gas storage to harvesting water from desert air.