Nobel Prize-winning chemist Omar Yaghi leaves Berkeley to lead China's AI materials institute

Nobel-Winning U.S. Chemist Omar Yaghi Will Move to China to Lead A.I. Institute

Omar Yaghi of the University of California, Berkeley, will head an initiative to apply artificial intelligence to the discovery of new materials. Omar Yaghi, an immigrant to the United States who shared last year's Nobel Prize in Chemistry, has left his faculty post at the University of California, Berkeley, for one in China, where he will lead an institute using artificial intelligence to accelerate the discovery of new materials. Dr. Yaghi's move comes amid the Trump administration's continuing disruptions of U.S. science funding and China's efforts to woo international scientists with hefty budgets. Last week, Tsinghua University in Beijing welcomed Dr. Yaghi in an appointment ceremony, calling him one of the world's foremost chemists. The university said he saw his new post as an opportunity "not to slow down, not to repeat what has already been done, but to do science with more energy, more intensity, and more ambition than ever before." "China is increasing its investment in science overall, including chemistry," said Alessandra Zimmermann, a budget analyst at the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a scientific group based in Washington, D.C. The best measures of scientific accomplishment, she added, show that China "has been outperforming the U.S. in top chemistry papers." Last year, three of America's six winners of science Nobels were born outside the country. In this century, overall, the émigré fraction for U.S. Nobels in physics, chemistry and medicine now stands at 40 percent. In an interview, Ram Seshadri, a professor of chemistry and materials science at the University of California, Santa Barbara, said Dr. Yaghi's move to China shed light on a fast-emerging dynamic between the two nations. "They've overtaken us in many areas of materials science and chemistry," he said, referring to China. "They're willing to invest very large sums of money to attract new talent." A subfield of chemistry, materials science is the underlying force behind many of the innovations that define modern life, from the silicon chips in smartphones to the carbon fibers in racing bikes to the biomaterials of medical implants. By nature, it's an interdisciplinary field that investigates the relationship between the structure of materials at an atomic or molecular scale and their macroscopic properties. Dr. Yaghi was born in Amman, Jordan, to Palestinian refugees whose one-room home lacked electricity and running water. Early on, he became fascinated with a schoolbook's depiction of atomic building blocks. When he was 15, his father, a butcher, sent him to the United States. Last year, before flying to Stockholm to receive his Nobel Prize, Dr. Yaghi in an interview with The New York Times voiced concern about Mr. Trump's immigration policies, saying that they endanger the nation's system of universities, companies and governments that promote scientific excellence. "I think it's regrettable," he said of Mr. Trump's nationalism. "We have to know that people coming from different backgrounds improve the level for everybody involved," he added. "That's an amazing story. Great thinkers can improve not only the U.S. but the world." Dr. Yaghi joined the University of California, Berkeley, in 2012, and while there earned many awards for his scientific advances. He received his Nobel Prize for helping discover a world of chemistry in which molecular building blocks are assembled into structures that possess vast internal surface areas -- the largest of any known substance. His porous structures can act like sponges that readily absorb, store and release gases and vapors. He named them metal-organic frameworks. The metal atoms form an adjustable framework that can hold chemicals associated with life -- carbon atoms in particular. While deeply theoretical, the frameworks are so radical, innovative and flexible in nature that materials experts and companies foresee many commercial uses for them. The frameworks can, for instance, harvest water from desert air. In 2018, Dr. Yaghi's students at Berkeley tested the idea in the Mojave Desert in California, finding that a small passive harvester could each day produce nearly three cups of pure, drinkable water. The device is now nearing commercialization. In the interview with The New York Times, Dr. Yaghi credited the invention to his boyhood efforts to secure water for his family. The municipal pipes worked for only a few hours every week or two. That hardship, he added, shows how the diverse experiences of émigrés can lead to unexpected breakthroughs. Dr. Yaghi has longstanding ties with Tsinghua University. In 2022, the Beijing school appointed him as an honorary professor and in that role he closely followed its work in chemistry, materials science and related disciplines. Now, on joining Tsinghua full time, Dr. Yaghi is being named as the head of a new A.I. institute for science research that will focus on the design and synthesis of new materials. Its underlying aim, the university said, is to "overcome the efficiency bottlenecks of traditional trial-and-error approaches" and shorten the usual cycles of discovery.

Who is Omar Yaghi? Nobel Prize-winning scientist leaves US to join Chinese research university; here's why

Nobel laureate Omar Yaghi will lead a new AI research center at Tsinghua University. This center aims to accelerate new material development using artificial intelligence. Yaghi, a renowned chemist, previously held a professorship at the University of California, Berkeley. He hopes to develop materials addressing global environmental challenges like water scarcity. Nobel Prize-winning material scientist Omar Yaghi has joined China's Tsinghua University to lead a new AI-driven research center. The 61-year-old chemist will head a team working on ways artificial intelligence (AI) can transform the design and synthesis of new materials and shorten their development cycle "by orders of magnitude," Tsinghua University said on Friday, according to the South China Morning Post (SCMP). The move, first reported by the SCMP, comes at a time when the administration of President Donald Trump has been pushing to cut US science spending and restrict international research partnerships. That tension became clear this fiscal year as Trump pursued sharp reductions in federal research budgets across government agencies. Yaghi, who previously served as the James and Neeltje Tretter Professor of Chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley, already had ties to Tsinghua University as an honorary professor since 2022, but he was formally welcomed as a full‑time faculty member during a ceremony on July 3, 2026. according to the scientific journal Nature. During his appointment ceremony, Yaghi said he hoped to develop materials to tackle major environmental challenges such as water shortages, carbon neutrality, and sustainable development. He added that he also wanted to help train young scientists in AI-driven chemistry. Yaghi's Nobel Prize Yaghi shared the 2025 Nobel Prize with Richard Robson and Susumu Kitagawa for their work on metal-organic frameworks, which are ultra-porous, spongelike materials created by linking metal ions with carbon-based molecules. According to the Nobel Prize website, "Metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) are porous materials in which metal ions and long carbon-based molecules form crystals with built-in cavities. By varying the building blocks, specific substances can be captured and stored inside the cavities." "Following pioneering work by Richard Robson, around the turn of the millennium, Omar Yaghi and Susumu Kitagawa developed more flexible and stable MOFs. These are possible to use, for example, to harvest water from desert air, capture carbon dioxide, store toxic gases, or catalyse chemical reactions," the website further stated. Who is Omar Yaghi? Born in Amman, Jordan, to a Palestinian refugee family in 1965, Yaghi was moved to the United States at the age of fifteen. He went on to earn his PhD in chemistry from the University of Illinois Urbana‑Champaign and later held faculty positions at Arizona State University, the University of Michigan, and the University of California, Los Angeles, before joining Berkeley. Alongside his US career, Yaghi built strong ties with China, becoming a foreign member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, winning the Nano Research Award multiple times, and establishing long‑standing collaborations with leading universities such as Tsinghua, Nanjing, Fudan, and Shanghai Jiao Tong. In 2025, Yaghi in an interview with The New York Times expressed concerns about Trump's immigration policies, noting that they endanger the country's system of universities, companies and governments that promote scientific excellence. "I think it's regrettable," he said of Trump's nationalism.