Chemistry Nobel at ICTP

How can the design of new materials help us tackle climate change and make our presence on this planet more sustainable? Nobel Laureate Omar Yaghi has found more than one answer to this question. In 2025, he was awarded the Chemistry Nobel Prize for the development of new, porous materials called metal–organic frameworks, characterised by built-in cavities that can capture and store specific substances. They can, for example, harvest water from desert air or capture carbon dioxide, and are therefore powerful tools to address and limit the impacts of climate change.

Yaghi will discuss some of his discoveries and the opportunities opened up by Artificial Intelligence in the field of materials design at an event organized jointly by ICTP and the University of Trieste on Wednesday 27 May at 10:30 at ICTP.

Yaghi’s lecture will be followed by a panel discussion with Laura Gagliardi of the University of Chicago, Hexiang Deng of Wuhan University, and Paolo Fornasiero of the University of  Trieste. The panel will be moderated by ICTP Senior Researcher Ralph Gebauer. 

The event will be livestreamed at http://ictp.it/livestream.

The colloquium is part of the celebrations of Abdus Salam’s centennial organized by ICTP throughout 2026.

Omar Yaghi

Yaghi is the James and Neeltje Tretter Professor of Chemistry at University of California, Berkeley and the Founding Director of the Berkeley Global Science Institute, whose mission is to build centers of research in developing countries and provide opportunities for young scholars to discover and learn. He is also the Co-Director of the Kavli Energy NanoSciences Institute, the California Research Alliance by BASF, as well as the Bakar Institute of Digital Materials for the Planet.

Yaghi is an elected member of many national science academies across the Americas, Europe and Asia. In addition to the Chemistry Nobel Prize, he has been honored with many awards, including the Wolf Prize in Chemistry (2018), the Balzan Prize (2024) and the Tang Prize (2024).

Born into a Palestinian refugee family in Jordan, Yaghi grew up in Amman, developing an early interest in chemistry sparked by the illustrations in books at the local library. At the age of 15, without knowing any English, he moved to the United States. He received his PhD in chemistry from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and was an NSF Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard University.

More information about the event is available at this link.