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Palestinian American Chemist Omar M. Yaghi Wins 2025 Nobel Prize in Chemistry

https://thepakistanconnect.com/omar-m-yaghi-nobel-prize/

Studying chemistry was not an obvious choice for Nobel Prize laureate Omar Yaghi. He and his many siblings were raised in a single room in Amman, Jordan, with no electricity or running water. School was a refuge from his otherwise challenging life. One day, when he was ten years old, he sneaked into the school library, which was usually locked, and picked a book at random from the shelf. On opening it, his eyes were drawn to unintelligible but captivating pictures – his first encounter with molecular structures. 

At the age of 15 – and on his father’s stern instruction – Yaghi moved to the US to study. He was attracted by chemistry and eventually by the art of designing new materials, but found the traditional way of building new molecules too unpredictable. Normally, chemists combine substances that are to react with each other in a container. Then, to start the chemical reaction, they heat the container. The desired molecule forms, but is also often accompanied by a range of contaminating side products.

In 1992, when Yaghi started his first position as research group leader, at Arizona State University, he wanted to find more controlled ways in which to create materials. His aim was to use rational design to connect different chemical constituents, like pieces of Lego, to make large crystals. This turned out to be challenging, but they finally succeeded when the research group started combining metal ions with organic molecules. In 1995, Yaghi published the structure of two different two-dimensional materials; these were like nets and were held together by copper or cobalt. The latter could host guest molecules in its spaces and, when these were fully occupied, it was so stable that it could be heated to 350°C without collapsing. Yaghi describes this material in an article in ‘Nature’ where he coins the name “metal–organic framework”; this term is now used to describe extended and ordered molecular structures that potentially contain cavities, and are built from metals and organic (carbon-based) molecules.