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Imagine a material so mystifying that a single gram of it boasts as much surface area as an industrial-sized warehouse—essentially, a molecular sponge capable of pulling fresh drinking water from arid desert air or capturing and trapping massive quantities of greenhouse gases from the atmosphere.

It’s not science fiction. It’s real-world chemistry called metal-organic frameworks (MOFs).

On Tuesday, October 8, 2025, the Royal Swedish Academy of Scientists awarded the to Omar M. Yaghi, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley; Susumu Kitagawa, a professor at Kyoto University in Japan; and Richard Robson, a professor at the University of Melbourne in Australia, for their pioneering contributions to the development of MOFs that has taken this type of structure from science fiction to reality.

The trio’s work in MOFs laid the groundwork for an entire subfield of chemistry, opening groundbreaking possibilities in clean energy, medicine, and environmental science.

Riddled with pores and empty chambers at an atomic level that dramatically increase surface area, MOFs are repeated crystalline, multidirectional networks made from—as the name suggests—metal ions or clusters connected by organic material. One of the most important things about MOFs is their versatility. Because they are modifiable and fine-tuned in thousands of ways, they have seemingly a nearly endless amount of potential applications.

“When you make a MOF, it is highly tunable in terms of structure and modularity,” says ������̳ Assistant Professor of Chemistry Sameh Elsaidi. “You can use any metal in the periodic table. You can use a wide variety of organic ligands to build the framework.”

This ability to be highly customizable by swapping one metal or molecule for another is what allows MOFs to have such a wide range of applications. Because they have such a large surface area, some MOFs are able to store a massive amount of trapped carbon dioxide from the air. Others can be filled with medication that is slowly and continually released over time, allowing for a new method of drug delivery.

It all stems from work that Yaghi, Kitagawa, and Robson started decades ago.

Elsaidi and Assistant Professor of Chemistry Mona Mohamed, who lead ������̳’s Center for Separation Science and Sustainability, count Yaghi and Kitagawa as personal mentors.

Elsaidi says that Yaghi and Kitagawa created “a blueprint for people to follow” through their MOFs work. He says he followed all that he did—and they even hosted Kitagawa as the keynote speaker at the 2024 Midwestern MOF Conference held at ������̳.

“I pursued my postdoctoral work with Nathaniel Rosi, a former student of Omar Yaghi,” says Mohamed. “We are part of this scientific family of MOF design established by Omar Yaghi and Susumu Kitagawa, a legacy that we continue to carry forward through the development of task-specific MOFs.”

And the Nobel recognition could mean even more for the future of the field.

“Drug delivery, catalysis, separation, water capture, sensing…every day, we find a new application for MOF,” says Mohamed. “Because of this recognition, scientists working in different areas such as artificial intelligence, soft robotics, the circular economy, and beyond may now begin to explore applications of MOFs that were never previously considered.”

Adds Elsaidi, “I think MOFs have the potential to help solve some of the toughest problems of our time.”

Image: Sameh Elsaidi (left) and Mona Mohamed (right).