Professor Omar Yaghi is considered the founder of "reticular chemistry"
Professor Omar Muanes Yaghi, a Palestinian scientist of Jordanian origin and a Saudi citizen, has won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced that the prize is being awarded jointly to Omar Yaghi, Susumu Kitagawa of Japan, and Richard Robson of Australia.
The three scientists received this honor in recognition of their invention of "metal-organic frameworks (MOFs)" and outstanding research contributions in it.
This award is the highest global honor in the chemical sciences and carries a prize of 11 million Swedish kronor (about $1.2 million).
Who are Saudi scientists?
Born in the Jordanian capital in 1965, Professor Omar Yaghi is a Palestinian and is currently a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, USA.
In addition, he is also the founding director of the Berkeley Global Sciences Institute and is engaged in research at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
He studied in the United States and received his PhD from the University of Illinois in 1990. After being a research fellow at Harvard University, he taught at major universities such as Arizona, Michigan, and UCLA. He has been associated with Berkeley since 2012.
Professor Yaghi is considered the founder of "reticular chemistry." This field introduced open framework structures that have had revolutionary significance in gas storage, energy conservation, and environmental technologies.
He has received several international awards, including the King Faisal Award (2015), the Mustafa Prize for Nanoscience, the Albert Einstein World Award for Science, and the First Class Medal of Excellence from King Abdullah II of Jordan (2017).
Because of these services, Professor Omar Yaghi was granted Saudi citizenship in 2021 and was also awarded the "Nawabig Al-Arab" award in 2024.
Omar Yaghi, considered one of the world's leading researchers in chemical sciences, also ranked second in the global ranking of the world's best scientists from 1998 to 2008.
This is the first time that a scientist with Saudi citizenship has received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, which marks a historic milestone not only in his personal journey but also in the scientific field of the Arab world.
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