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Nobel-winning materials scientist Omar Yaghi joins China’s Tsinghua University from the US

Omar Yaghi, the winner of last year’s Nobel Prize for chemistry, has left the United States to lead a new AI-driven research centre at China’s…

By Samantha Johnson / July 4, 2026

Omar Yaghi, the winner of last year’s Nobel Prize for chemistry, has left the United States to lead a new AI-driven research centre at China’s Tsinghua University.

The 61-year-old materials scientist 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 said on Friday.

Speaking at 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 was previously the James and Neeltje Tretter professor of chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley. He 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.

These and other related materials have the highest surface areas known to date, allowing them to capture and convert carbon, harvest water from desert air and absorb hydrogen to produce clean energy.

Zhou Zihui, a postdoctoral researcher at UC Berkeley, said Yaghi had trained about 200 researchers, nearly half of whom were Chinese.

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