The three chemists Prof. Richard Robson, Prof. Susumu Kitagawa and Prof. Omar Yaghi received this year’s Noble Prize in chemistry for their pioneering work in the development of metal-organic frameworks (MOFs). These materials are assembled in a modular fashion from organic linkers and metal nodes, forming highly porous structures with enormous surface areas. Due to the vast number of possible variations in these building blocks, more than 100,000 different MOF structures are known today. Thanks to their highly porous nature, they are capable of transporting, storing, and transforming chemicals and gases. MOFs have been applied, for example, in capturing water in deserts, separating CO₂ from industrial gas streams, and in various catalytic reactions. Due to these versatile applications, MOFs are a major focus of intensive research in the field of green and sustainable chemistry, a key interest of UniSysCat.
Prof. Omar Yaghi is the James and Neeltje Tretter Chair Professor of Chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley, and an elected member of the US National Academy of Sciences as well as the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina. Presently, he is hosted by UniSysCat members Prof. Matthias Driess and Arne Thomas at the TU Berlin and holds a Humboldt Research Award for synthesizing novel metal-free covalent networks as nano- and mesoscopic reaction vessel for new developments to increase the separation and storage capacity of molecular hydrogen. In this context Prof. Yaghi presented in a special UniSysCat colloquium last year his inaugural lecture for the Humboldt Research Award.