Chemist Omar Yaghi has accepted a full-time position as a researcher at Tsinghua University in Beijing, China.Credit: Justin Sullivan/Getty
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.
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The move, first reported by the South China Morning Post, comes as the administration of President Donald Trump continues its attempts to slash US science spending and limits international research partnerships. Some nations, including China, have responded by trying to lure US talent with the promise of money and support. Earlier this year, for instance, France announced that it would award funds to dozens of US scientists relocating there. China has been wooing international researchers with talent-recruitment programmes, and some of its cities and provinces are even offering researchers lump sums and monthly allowances to relocate within their borders.
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 was unavailable to speak 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.
Metal-organic framework (MOF) compounds usually have metal-containing nodes (blue and red) linked by organic molecules (grey and white). The one shown here, called MOF-5, is a famous example synthesized by Yaghi’s lab. The purple sphere represents the MOF’s large central pore that can fill with, for example, gases.Credit: Thom Leach/Science Photo Library
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.
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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.
