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Nobel-prize-winning chemist Omar Yaghi has left the United States for a full-time position at Tsinghua University in Beijing, China, where he will lead a new artificial-intelligence-assisted materials discovery institute.
Yaghi already had a connection to Tsinghua University — he became an honorary professor there in 2022. But he was officially welcomed as a full-time faculty member at a 3 July ceremony. Yaghi declined to comment to Nature for this story.
However, in a recent interview with Scientific American he said that the current state of US science is “not so encouraging because of the cutting back on grants” and because of a drop in the support from US science agencies that academic researchers rely on. He also worried that US researchers were not embracing what he sees as an “AI revolution”. Researchers need to engage with AI models, he said, “as a matter of survival of the advanced research system in the US”.
A materials pioneer
Born in Amman, Jordan, to Palestinian refugees, Yaghi came to the United States at age 15 and had lived there until the recent move to China. He is best known for developing metal-organic framework (MOF) compounds, which are highly porous materials that have vast internal surface areas making them capable of storing gases, serving as catalysts for chemical reactions and more. Chemists have created more than 100,000 types of MOF, with an eye towards putting them to use in broad commercial applications, including harvesting water from the air and delivering drugs inside the body.
Yaghi — who had been a researcher at the University of California (UC), Berkeley, since 2012 — has earned a slew of awards for his contributions to materials science, including the Albert Einstein World Award of Science, the Wolf Prize in Chemistry and, last year, a share of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. He has also founded and co-founded several US companies, including Atoco in Irvine, California, which is developing materials for water harvesting and carbon capture, and WaHa in Fremont, California, which has created a device that turns “humidity into pure water while cutting energy costs for climate control,” according to WaHa’s website.
Yaghi had stepped down from WaHa’s board in 2022, says Frank Ramirez, co-founder and chief executive of the company, adding that its businesses will be unaffected by his move to China.
As for Atoco, Yaghi’s move will keep him more involved with the company than ever before, says Samer Taha, the company’s chief executive. Atoco is collaborating with the Yaghi Science Initiative, a nonprofit launched by the Nobel laureate to connect researchers across a number of countries and to support early-career researchers in solving global challenges. Yaghi’s move to China is part of this global science initiative, Taha says, and it “will multiply the opportunities for transformative discoveries”.
Tackling complex problems
A possible motive behind Yaghi’s move could be that after winning his Nobel Prize, he wants to “do something more” and “build a new paradigm of research by combining AI, chemistry and material sciences”, says Marina Zhang, a science-policy researcher at the University of Technology Sydney in Australia, who focuses on innovation in China.
Tsinghua’s goal with Yaghi at the helm of its new programme is to “tackle complex problems beyond any single field”, and to bridge “Eastern and Western intellectual traditions for the benefit of all humankind”, says Lei Liu, who is the chair of the university’s chemistry department.
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