Nobel Laureate Omar M. Yaghi Joins Tsinghua Full-Time

On July 3, Tsinghua University held the appointment ceremony for Professor Omar M. Yaghi, who joins the university as a full-time chaired professor. A recipient of the 2025 Nobel Prize in Chemistry and one of the world's foremost materials chemists, Yaghi will further strengthen Tsinghua's research capabilities in chemistry and materials science.

At the ceremony, Professor Yaghi reflected that his fascination with molecules began at the age of ten, and that a pure passion for science has inspired him to transcend geographical and cultural boundaries throughout his career in materials science. Today, his research focuses on global challenges including water security, carbon neutrality, and sustainable development, with the goal of addressing fundamental issues that affect humanity. Acknowledging that scientific research is rarely a smooth journey, he emphasized that science possesses a unique power to transform the unknown into discovery while cultivating curiosity, dedication, and courage in the face of challenges. By joining Tsinghua, he said, he hopes to embark on a new chapter in both research and education with renewed enthusiasm and greater ambition, working alongside colleagues to address the defining questions of our time, expand the frontiers of knowledge, and ensure that scientific innovation benefits the world.

According to Tsinghua University, Professor Yaghi will lead the establishment of the University-level AI Materials Chemistry Research Center (AIMATRY). Building upon the Department of Chemistry and the Department of Chemical Engineering, the center will collaborate closely with the Institute for AI Industry Research, the Department of Computer Science and Technology, the School of Materials Science and Engineering, and other academic units. The center will develop forward-looking AI-enabled technologies for materials design and synthesis, with the goal of dramatically shortening the development cycle for new materials. By creating an intelligent, end-to-end research and development framework spanning theory, computation, R&D, and manufacturing, AIMATRY aims to overcome the efficiency limitations of traditional trial-and-error approaches and establish an independent technical standards system covering the entire lifecycle of intelligent materials.

Professor Yaghi will also play a leading role in cultivating interdisciplinary talent at the intersection of artificial intelligence and materials science. Leveraging his international academic standing, he will work with leading scholars worldwide to build an integrated AI-plus-Chemistry education and research platform at Tsinghua. Through interdisciplinary curricula, small-class teaching, and hands-on research training, the platform will nurture a new generation of highly qualified researchers with expertise spanning AI, materials chemistry, and related interdisciplinary fields.

Omar M. Yaghi

Professor Omar M. Yaghi is the recipient of the 2025 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. He is also a foreign member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina.

Born in Amman, Jordan, in 1965, Yaghi received his Ph.D. in Chemistry from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 1990 before undertaking postdoctoral research at Harvard University. He subsequently held faculty positions at several leading American universities and has served as the James and Neeltje Tretter Chair Professor of Chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley, since 2012, while also serving as a senior scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Throughout his career, he has received numerous prestigious international honors, including the Einstein World Award of Science, the Wolf Prize in Chemistry, and the Balzan Prize.

Professor Yaghi's research encompasses the synthesis, structure, and properties of inorganic and organic compounds, as well as the design and construction of novel crystalline materials. He pioneered the building-block approach, which has enabled exponential growth in the discovery of new materials and generated unprecedented chemical diversity. He is the inventor of metal-organic frameworks (MOFs), covalent organic frameworks (COFs), and molecular weaving, and was the first to define the field of reticular chemistry, establishing an entirely new paradigm for materials design.

To date, Professor Yaghi has published more than 300 research papers, which have collectively received over 260,000 citations. He has authored more than 30 papers in the world's leading scientific journals, including Nature and Science.