From Palestinian refugee to Nobel glory: Omar Yaghi’s incredible journey

Dubai: Jordanian-American chemist Omar Yaghi of the University of California (UC), Berkeley, has been awarded the 2025 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, sharing it with Richard Robson of the University of Melbourne, Australia, and Susumu Kitagawa of Kyoto University, Japan.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said the trio was recognised for “creating molecular constructions with large spaces through which gases and other chemicals can flow.”

Their groundbreaking discovery of metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) has given rise to a new class of porous materials capable of storing, filtering, and transforming molecules.

Born in 1965 to Palestinian refugee parents in Amman, Jordan, Omar Yaghi has journeyed from modest beginnings above his father’s butcher shop to the heights of global science.

His father raised cattle and owned a butcher shop in Amman, according to UC.

"I grew up in a very humble home. We were a dozen of us in one small room, sharing it with the cattle that we used to raise," he told the Nobel Foundation in an interview after learning he had won the prestigious prize.

Their home had no electricity or running water. His father had only finished sixth grade and his mother could neither read nor write.

At the age of 15, he was told by his father that he must go to the US to study and, within the year before he graduated from high school, he had obtained a visa and settled alone, in Troy, New York, to pursue his college education.

With a poor grasp of English, Yaghi took courses in English, math and science at Hudson Valley Community College in Troy.

Supporting himself by bagging groceries and mopping floors, he graduated in 1985 with a BS in chemistry cum laude and pursued a Ph.D., which he completed in 1990 at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Following a National Science Foundation postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard University, he joined the faculty at Arizona State University in 1992, then at the University of Michigan in 1999 and, after that, at UCLA in 2007.

In 2012, he joined the chemistry faculty at UC Berkeley and became director of the Molecular Foundry at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, a position he held until 2013. He is the founding director of the Berkeley Global Science Institute and co-director of the Kavli Energy NanoScience Institute and of the California Research Alliance by BASF.

“I was in love with chemistry from the very beginning,” Yaghi once said. “I disliked class, but I loved the lab,” according to the UC report.

At Berkeley, Yaghi leads research and mentorship programmes that promote science without borders, empowering young scholars worldwide through the Berkeley Global Science Institute, which has established research centres in Vietnam, Saudi Arabia, Japan, Jordan, South Korea, Argentina, Malaysia, and Indonesia.

In the 1990s, Yaghi and his students combined metals with organic linkers to build hybrid compounds with a highly porous crystal structure that could absorb, store, and release gases and vapors. Earlier “coordination polymers” had been fragile, but Yaghi’s new design produced robust, stable crystals that could be endlessly customized.

He realised that these frameworks could be tailored atom by atom — a “Lego-like” chemistry where scientists could design matter with purpose. Today, MOFs and their derivatives are being used to:

Yaghi’s breakthroughs have helped merge the worlds of organic and inorganic chemistry, leading to new energy technologies and sustainability tools.

One of the world’s most cited chemists, Yaghi has received dozens of major honours, including the 2024 Tang Prize in Sustainable Development, the 2025 Von Hippel Award, the 2018 Wolf Prize in Chemistry, and the 2020 Royal Society of Chemistry Sustainable Water Award.

He is an elected member of the US National Academy of Sciences, the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and several global scientific academies across Asia and the Middle East, according to the UC.

Now an American citizen living in Berkeley, Yaghi’s influence extends far beyond the lab. Through his concept of reticular chemistry, he has given science a new way to design the materials of the future — and a generation of young researchers a reason to believe that discovery has no borders.

Yaghi is the 28th UC Berkeley faculty member to win a Nobel Prize and the fifth winner in the past five years. On Tuesday, John Clarke shared the 2025 Nobel Prize in physics with two UC Santa Barbara faculty members, Michel H. Devoret and John M. Martinis.

From refugee roots to Nobel glory, Omar Yaghi’s life is a testament to the power of perseverance, imagination, and the universal language of science.