Omar Yaghi first discovered his love for chemistry in Jordan, where he was born a refugee.
“When I was growing up, at 10 years old, I discovered molecular drawings," he said. "I didn't know they were molecular drawings. There was a break that I had where I fell in love with these drawings that turned out to be the basis of chemistry.”
Yaghi said his father encouraged him to foster this curiosity by pursuing his education in the U.S. And as Yaghi credits the American public education system with much of his success, he says Hudson Valley Community College gave him an important first step.
“Your work is evaluated based on its merit, not based on where you got your degree. I’m living proof of that.”
Yaghi completed an associate's degree in Chemistry at Hudson Valley Community College and also earned a bachelor's in chemistry at the University at Albany. Now a professor at University of California, Berkeley, Yaghi says the Nobel Prize was a result of several decades of research. He was one of the first scientists in the 1990s to develop metal-organic frameworks, which are crystal structures made by binding metal atoms to organic molecules.
Metal-organic frameworks provide a method to potentially mitigate the effects of climate change and greenhouse gases on a molecular level.
"We developed a way to control matter on the atomic and molecular level, and use that control to build in a customized fashion, materials that would store hydrogen for clean energy, that would capture CO two from power plants and from the air to make clean air, to take water out of the air, especially arid air, and make drinking water," he said.
Yaghi shares the prize with Richard Robson at the University of Melbourne, Australia, and Susumu Kitagawa of Kyoto University in Japan.
In 2020, Yaghi founded the company Atoco to use MOFs to combat the effects of climate change and make drinking water more accessible. Much like education, he sees science as an investment in the future.
“Once you think about it as an investment, then you achieve scenarios like when we had the pandemic, the solution to the pandemic was not very far around the corner because we've done a lot of basic research," he said. "We funded a lot of basic research that has led to a solution to a major societal problem.”
Now that he is a Nobel laureate, Yaghi plans to continue his work and scholarship with newfound commitment.
“I don’t see it as an end of a career, I see it as a beginning of something bigger," he said. "I didn’t expect this, but I have been imbued with more energy, more intensity than I ever thought was possible actually.”
