Susumu Kitagawa, Richard Robson and Omar Yaghi are announced as the winners of the 2025 Nobel Prize in Chemistry at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm, on Wednesday.JONATHAN NACKSTRAND/AFP/Getty Images
Three scientists who discovered how to create a class of remarkable materials with microscopic cavities that are ideal for stashing away molecules of other substances have been awarded this year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
On Wednesday, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced that Susumu Kitagawa, 74, of Kyoto University in Japan; Richard Robson, 88, of the University of Melbourne in Australia; and Omar Yaghi, 60, at the University of California, Berkeley in the United States will jointly share the chemistry prize.
“It’s absolutely thrilling,” Dr. Yaghi said during a press briefing hours after he received a call informing him of the prize, which came while he was between flights at the main airport in Frankfurt, Germany.
Along with Dr. Robson and Dr. Kitagawa, he is known for his work on “metal-organic frameworks,” or MOFs. They are porous solids made of metal atoms joined by carbon-based connectors that can act as tiny cages for different species of molecules, including hard-to-trap gasses like hydrogen and carbon dioxide.
Richard Robson first began working on the materials in 1989 starting with copper ions arranged in diamond-like patterns.Supplied/AFP/Getty Images
First developed more than three decades ago, MOFs are now the subject of active investigations for a range of possible uses including hydrogen storage for fuel or the removal of toxic “forever chemicals” from community water supplies.
Other forms of MOFs are being explored as drug delivery devices that can hold onto medications until they arrive at the correct place in the body where they can be released to optimal effect.
During Wednesday’s prize announcement, scientists with the Noble Committee for Chemistry compared the prodigious storage capacity of MOFs to Hermione Granger’s magical handbag from the Harry Potter series.
For example, the material known as MOF-5, first created in Dr. Yaghi’s lab, has so many tiny recesses tucked into its molecular structure that if a sugar cube-size volume of it was spread out flat it would be more than enough to cover a hockey rink.
“They are small on the outside but very large on the inside,” said Olof Ramström, a professor of chemistry at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, when describing the materials.
Japanese scientist Susumu Kitagawa at a press conference in Kyoto, on Wedensday.KYODO/Reuters
Another attractive feature of MOFs is their versatility. When they are produced, their structures can be precisely tuned to exhibit affinities for very different kinds of molecules.
This has enabled one of the most promising applications of the materials to date: as a form of carbon capture technology deployed at power plants and other sites that generate carbon dioxide.
One version of the material, called CALF-20, after Calgary, where it was developed and unveiled in 2021, has been licensed to a least four companies.
Chemistry professor Omar Yaghi in his lab at the University of California, Berkeley.Brittany Hosea-Small/UC Berkeley/Reuters
The material has proved to be particularly effective because it prefers to capture carbon dioxide molecules more than it does water vapour, which is also a byproduct of combustion. In addition, it is easier to empty and reuse the material than other forms of carbon capture technology.
“I’ve seen the uptake, I know the the numbers that are coming in and I’m confident that these materials absolutely will make an impact,” said George Shimizu, a professor of chemistry at the University of Calgary who led the discovery of CALF-20.
It was Dr. Robson, working in Australia, who first opened up the field of MOFs in 1989 when he began with a substance that contained copper ions arranged in diamond-like patterns. The results were intriguing, but the three-dimensional geometry of the material could not be stabilized.
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This was only achieved in the 1990s through the work of Dr. Kitagawa in Japan, and then Dr. Yaghi, a Jordanian from a Palestinian refugee family who moved to the United States as a teenager to pursue his education.
Speaking with reporters by telephone after the announcement, Dr. Kitagawa said he was hopeful the materials he and his co-winners have developed will provide transformational benefits for society. Noting that they have many surprising properties, he added, “this is my fun – to discover new properties” of MOFs.
Wednesday’s announcement marks the third of this year’s science-related Nobels.
On Monday, the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to a trio of researchers in the U.S. and Japan for discoveries related to the human immune system.
Three more U.S.-based scientists were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics on Tuesday for discoveries that have helped to set the stage for practical quantum computers.