Nobel-winning US chemist will move to China to lead AI institute

WASHINGTON - Omar Yaghi, an immigrant to the United States who shared the 2025 Nobel Prize in chemistry, has left his faculty post at the University of California, Berkeley, for one in China, where he will lead an institute using artificial intelligence to accelerate the discovery of new materials.

Yaghi’s move comes amid the Trump administration’s continuing disruptions of US science funding and China’s efforts to woo international scientists with hefty budgets.

Last week, Tsinghua University in Beijing welcomed Yaghi in an appointment ceremony, calling him one of the world’s foremost chemists.

The university said he saw his new post as an opportunity “not to slow down, not to repeat what has already been done, but to do science with more energy, more intensity, and more ambition than ever before”.

“China is increasing its investment in science overall, including chemistry,” said Alessandra Zimmermann, a budget analyst at the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a scientific group based in Washington, DC.

The best measures of scientific accomplishment, she added, show that China “has been outperforming the US in top chemistry papers”.

In 2025, three of America’s six winners of science Nobels were born outside the country. In this century, overall, the emigre fraction for US Nobels in physics, chemistry and medicine now stands at 40 per cent.

In an interview, Ram Seshadri, a professor of chemistry and materials science at the University of California, Santa Barbara, said Yaghi’s move to China shed light on a fast-emerging dynamic between the two nations.

“They’ve overtaken us in many areas of materials science and chemistry,” he said, referring to China. “They’re willing to invest very large sums of money to attract new talent.”

A subfield of chemistry, materials science is the underlying force behind many of the innovations that define modern life, from the silicon chips in smartphones to the carbon fibres in racing bikes to the biomaterials of medical implants.

By nature, it is an interdisciplinary field that investigates the relationship between the structure of materials at an atomic or molecular scale and their macroscopic properties.

Yaghi was born in Amman, Jordan, to Palestinian refugees whose one-room home lacked electricity and running water.

Early on, he became fascinated with a schoolbook’s depiction of atomic building blocks. When he was 15, his father, a butcher, sent him to the United States.

In 2025, before flying to Stockholm to receive his Nobel Prize, Yaghi in an interview with The New York Times voiced concern about US President Donald Trump’s immigration policies, saying that they endanger the nation’s system of universities, companies and governments that promote scientific excellence.

“I think it’s regrettable,” he said of Trump’s nationalism.

“We have to know that people coming from different backgrounds improve the level for everybody involved,” he added. “That’s an amazing story. Great thinkers can improve not only the US but the world.”

Yaghi joined the University of California, Berkeley, in 2012, and while there earned many awards for his scientific advances.

He received his Nobel Prize for helping discover a world of chemistry in which molecular building blocks are assembled into structures that possess vast internal surface areas – the largest of any known substance. His porous structures can act like sponges that readily absorb, store and release gases and vapours.

He named them metal-organic frameworks. The metal atoms form an adjustable framework that can hold chemicals associated with life – carbon atoms in particular.

While deeply theoretical, the frameworks are so radical, innovative and flexible in nature that materials experts and companies foresee many commercial uses for them.

The frameworks can, for instance, harvest water from desert air. In 2018, Yaghi’s students at Berkeley tested the idea in the Mojave Desert in California, finding that a small passive harvester could each day produce nearly three cups of pure, drinkable water. The device is now nearing commercialisation.

In the interview with the Times, Yaghi credited the invention to his boyhood efforts to secure water for his family. The municipal pipes worked for only a few hours every week or two.

That hardship, he added, shows how the diverse experiences of emigres can lead to unexpected breakthroughs.

Yaghi has long-standing ties with Tsinghua University. In 2022, the Beijing school appointed him as an honorary professor and in that role he closely followed its work in chemistry, materials science and related disciplines.

Now, on joining Tsinghua full time, Yaghi is being named as the head of a new AI institute for science research that will focus on the design and synthesis of new materials.

Its underlying aim, the university said, is to “overcome the efficiency bottlenecks of traditional trial-and-error approaches” and shorten the usual cycles of discovery. NYTIMES

• This article originally appeared in The New York Times.