Nobel Prize winner leaving UC Berkeley for new role in China

Nobel Prize recipient Omar Yaghi is leaving his role at UC Berkeley to lead the development of a new artificial intelligence institute at Tsinghua University in Beijing, the Chinese university announced.

Yaghi will head the AI Chemistry and Materials Research Institute at Tsinghua, where he was appointed an honorary professor in 2022. Known as AIMATRY (AI × Materials × Chemistry), the new center will focus on material design and synthesis through artificial intelligence, according to a statement from the university.

In 2025, Yaghi shared the Nobel Prize in chemistry with Susumu Kitagawa of Kyoto University and Richard Robson of the University of Melbourne for their development of metal-organic frameworks, a type of super-porous material in which metal ions and carbon-based molecules combine to form crystals with exceptionally large surface areas.

The material has the potential to combat climate change by capturing and storing carbon or other pollutants, and by extracting water from the atmosphere in water-scarce areas. Upon awarding the prize, a member of the Nobel committee likened the technology’s ability to store enormous amounts of stuff in seemingly compact spaces to Hermione Granger’s enchanted handbag in the Harry Potter series.

Yaghi’s Irvine-based company, Atoco, has said it will start taking orders later this year for its technology that harvests water from the air.

A representative for Yaghi said he was not yet available to respond to questions.

China is one of several countries that has been actively recruiting scientists from the U.S., where the Trump administration has slashed science funding, suspended research grants, fired science advisors and tightened immigration restrictions.

“For many, many years, our funding was very competitive; if you worked hard and you were doing good research, you would get funding,” Yaghi said of the U.S. in an interview with Scientific American earlier this year. “The current state is not so encouraging because of the cutting back on grants and support of science by the very agencies that many university researchers rely on.”

Yaghi was born in Jordan to Palestinian refugees, and immigrated to the U.S. when he was 15 to study.

“We’ve learned over and over in human civilization that scholars can move across borders,” Yaghi told the New York Times last year. “This is how knowledge spread and how vast regions of the world lifted themselves out of poverty.”