The Nobel Prize in Chemistry was announced on Wednesday, October 8, with one of the three winners being Professor Omar Yaghi, winner of the recent Great Arab Minds Award held in the UAE.
Dubai’s Ruler, who had personally handed Omar his award, congratulated the professor on this major milestone.
“A year ago, we honored Professor Omar Yaghi with the Arab Geniuses Award in the category of Natural Sciences… and today we congratulate him on winning the Nobel Prize in Chemistry,” said Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice-President and Prime Minister of UAE, and Ruler of Dubai.
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The leader took pride in the excellence and talent pouring out of the Arab world.
“We congratulate Professor Omar… and before that, we congratulate the Arab world for these minds that we take pride in before all nations. The Arab nation is full of geniuses… rich in intellect… and our mission is to restore confidence in ourselves… confidence in our youth… and confidence in our scholars. This is our message in the Arab Geniuses Award and in all our humanitarian, civilizational, and intellectual projects.”
On Wednesday, Omar Yaghi along with scientists Susumu Kitagawa and Richard Robson won the 2025 Nobel Prize in Chemistry “for the development of metal–organic frameworks”.
Born into a refugee family, Professor Omar rose to become a professor of Chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley, and a world-renowned scientist, known as the father of reticular chemistry.
Yaghi has made groundbreaking advancements in reticular chemistry, resulting in pioneering applications for pressing global challenges. He has published over 300 research papers, with more than 250,000 citations of his work.
Nobel prize win in Chemistry
The more than a century-old prize is awarded by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and the winners share 11 million Swedish crowns ($1.2 million), as well as the fame of winning arguably the world’s most prestigious science award.
“They have found ways to create materials, entirely novel materials, with large cavities on their inside which can be seen almost like rooms in a hotel, so that guest molecules can enter and also exit again from the same material,” Heiner Linke, Chairman of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry, told a press conference.
“A small amount of such material can be almost like Hermione’s handbag in Harry Potter. It can store huge amounts of gas in a tiny volume.”
The three laureates worked to create molecular constructions with large spaces through which gases and other chemicals can flow and that can be utilised to harvest water from desert air, capture carbon dioxide and store toxic gases.
The Chemistry Nobel was the third prize announced in this year’s crop of awards, in keeping with tradition, following those for medicine and physics announced earlier this week.
Inputs from Reuters
Kitagawa, Robson and Yaghi win 2025 Nobel Prize in Chemistry
Trio win physics Nobel for quantum mechanical tunnelling
Nobel prizes 2025: 5 things to know about the awards ahead of announcements
