Professor Omar Mwannes Yaghi

Omar Yaghi moved to the USA to pursue college education. Initially, he entered Hudson Valley Community College then transferred to the State University of New York (SUNY) in Albany, New York, where he obtained his bachelor’s degree in 1985. Thereafter, he moved to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign from which he obtained his Ph.D. in chemistry in 1990 and was subsequently awarded a two-year post-doctoral fellowship by the National Science Foundation at Harvard University.

Professor Yaghi joined the teaching staff of Arizona State University from 1992-1998; the University of Michigan from 1999-2006, and the University of California, Los Angeles from 2006-2011. In 2012, he was appointed as the first James and Neeltje Trettor Chair of Chemistry at the University of California in Berkeley. He was appointed as a Co-Director of Kavli Energy NanoSciences Institute at UC Berkeley the following year, and co-director of the California Research Alliance by BASF in 2014.

Professor Yaghi has made seminal contributions to the field of metal organic frameworks (MOFs). In the last two decades, he developed MOFs through highly innovative approaches to construct novel materials, and explored their applications in various fields, including encapsulation of biomolecules, and capturing of gasses such as carbon dioxide and hydrogen.

His outstanding contributions have gained him numerous awards and honors. For his early accomplishments in the design and synthesis of new materials, he was recognized by the Exxon Award of the American Chemical Society in 1998 and the Sacconi Medal of the Italian Chemical Society in 2004. For his ground-breaking research on hydrogen storage, the monthly magazine Popular Science has placed him among the ten most brilliant scientists and engineers in the United States in 2006. In 2007, Professor Yaghi received the US Department of Energy Hydrogen Program Award, and the Material Research Society’s Medal for his pioneering research into the theory, design, synthesis and applications of MOFs. He was also awarded the Newcomb-Cleveland Prize of the American Association for the Advancement of Science for the best paper published in Science in 2008. In 2009, he received the Chemistry of Materials Award of the American Chemical Society.

Professor Yaghi published around 200 scientific papers in prestigious journals, with a total of more than 60,000 citations. Professor Yaghi was selected from among 6000 chemists as the second most cited chemist in the world.

This biography was written in the year the prize was awarded.