As a child in Amman, Jordan, Omar Yaghi lived with uncertainty around basic necessities. Born to a family of Palestinian refugees, he was raised in circumstances shaped by displacement and limited resources, where access to water was neither reliable nor guaranteed. His family lived together in a single shared room, alongside the animals that sustained his father’s butcher shop, with sacks of grain serving as makeshift walls. There was no electricity, no running water and little privacy. Municipal pipes ran only intermittently, sometimes for a few hours every week or two, and families depended on careful planning and storage to meet daily needs, including keeping the animals alive. For Yaghi, water was not an abstraction. It was a vital resource tied directly to his family’s survival.
Decades later, those memories would help Yaghi, who earned his bachelor’s degree in chemistry from the University at Albany in 1985, make a scientific breakthrough: materials capable of pulling drinkable water directly from desert air. But long before that idea took shape in a laboratory, it lived as a childhood question — why something so essential could be so scarce, and whether chemistry might one day offer an answer.
That question was nurtured in a household where education mattered deeply. Yaghi’s father, who completed school through the sixth grade, believed learning was the surest way for his children to have options. His mother, who could not read or write, reinforced that belief through daily work, encouragement and an unspoken understanding that effort was not negotiable. They did not talk often about sacrifice. They showed it. Some of Yaghi’s most formative lessons came during the walks he took to school with his father. “My father spoke continuously,” Yaghi said, “about how to conduct oneself, how to work with honesty and precision, how to respect others, what to do and what not to do, how to forge one’s own path in life, and why doing so mattered.”
In third grade, Yaghi pulled a book from his school library shelf filled with unfamiliar ball-and-stick drawings and studied it on his own. This pattern — repetition followed by mastery — became the way he learned. Over time, his father understood that his son’s innate learning ability had outgrown what their circumstances could support. When Yaghi was 15, his father made the decision to send him to the United States to pursue an education. On the morning he left, Yaghi’s mother packed his favorite lunch — bread, grapes and cheese — believing he would return later that day.
“It was an act of protection and love, though at the time it felt like rupture,” Yaghi said. “I embraced my brothers and sisters, exchanged quick words with my father, and soon found myself propelled toward a destination I knew only from maps — a place shaped more by imagination than experience.”
Yaghi arrived in the U.S. with limited English, little formal training in chemistry and an intense curiosity about how the world worked at its most basic level. He settled in Troy, New York, where, with the help of his older brother, Khaled, he followed his father’s instruction to go to the nearest school and enroll.
"Life experiences drawn from diverse and adverse environments can fuel scientific breakthroughs."
In the United States, Yaghi found himself separated from his family, navigating a new culture and a new language. He enrolled at Hudson Valley Community College, where he began taking courses in English, math and science. It was there that chemistry began to reveal itself not just as a subject, but as a way of thinking — logical, experimental and universal. After earning his associate degree in 1983, Yaghi transferred to the University at Albany.
“Education was not merely personal advancement; it was duty,” he said. “My parents had invested everything they had — every coin, every opportunity — into the hope that their children would build lives beyond scarcity.”
At UAlbany, Yaghi found his stride — and his passion.
“I was in love with chemistry from the very beginning,” he would later say. “When I moved to Albany, I immediately got into research.” He did not limit himself to a single project. Instead, he immersed himself fully, working simultaneously on three different research efforts with three different professors — a physical organic project with one, a biophysical project with another and a theory project with a third. Faculty members took notice. Among them was William D. Closson, a chemistry professor who colleagues later recalled spoke often of Yaghi’s productivity, intellect and seriousness. The laboratory was where ideas became tangible. It was a place of focus and possibility — a setting that rewarded persistence, curiosity and hands-on problem-solving. The experience was formative. It was at UAlbany that chemistry stopped being a subject he studied and became something he practiced — something he built.
After graduating from UAlbany, Yaghi earned his PhD in chemistry at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and completed a National Science Foundation postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard University. When the time came to take his first faculty position, he chose Arizona State University. It was a decision that was both practical and personal.
“I chose Arizona State University in part because the desert landscape felt familiar,” Yaghi said. “It steadied me.”
He arrived to find an empty laboratory — no established infrastructure and no guarantee of success. In that setting, Yaghi began work that would define his scientific independence, asking a question many in the field considered impractical, if not impossible: Could matter itself be designed deliberately, assembled from molecular building blocks into extended, predictable structures? The answer led Yaghi to pioneer a new field known as reticular chemistry. At its core, reticular chemistry is about design — assembling molecular building blocks into precise, extended frameworks. The structures Yaghi and his colleagues created are crystalline, ordered and porous, with internal surfaces so vast that a sugar-cube-sized sample can contain the surface area of a football field. These materials include metal-organic frameworks and their close relatives, covalent organic frameworks. Known collectively as MOFs and COFs, they can be engineered to perform specific tasks like storing hydrogen and methane for clean fuel, capturing carbon dioxide from industrial emissions or harvesting water from the air.
Over the next 25 years, Yaghi’s work carried him from Arizona State University to the University of Michigan, then to UCLA and eventually to the University of California, Berkeley — a place that had once doubted the feasibility of his ideas. Along the way, he founded companies to move discoveries beyond the laboratory and helped establish research centers across the Middle East and Southeast Asia. He mentored generations of students, treating research as shared labor — from the first idea to the final draft. In 2018, Yaghi’s students tested a MOF-based water harvester in California’s Mojave Desert. The device produced nearly three cups of clean drinking water per day using only ambient humidity. The connection was unmistakable.
“That discovery would not have happened if I didn’t have that background,” he said, referring to his childhood experience with water scarcity. “Life experiences drawn from diverse and adverse environments can fuel scientific breakthroughs.”
From an empty laboratory in the Arizona desert, Yaghi’s work ultimately carried him to Stockholm, Sweden, in December 2025, where he was awarded the highest honor in his field of study: the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Yaghi shared the honor with Susumu Kitagawa of Kyoto University and Richard Robson of the University of Melbourne. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences recognized the trio for developing metal-organic frameworks, a breakthrough that reshaped how chemists think about structure, space and possibility. For Yaghi, the moment marked a pinnacle not only of scientific achievement, but of a journey that began far from the Nobel stage. He is the first UAlbany alum to receive a Nobel Prize — a distinction rooted in years of discovery that trace back to his time in upstate New York, where a young student found his footing in chemistry labs and discovered that science could be both a language and a home.
Beyond his laboratory work, Yaghi is known as a mentor and institution builder. At Berkeley, he serves as founding director of the Berkeley Global Science Institute, which works to connect scientists across borders and expand access to research opportunities worldwide. Colleagues describe him as driven not only by discovery, but by a belief in science as an equalizing force — a way to identify talent wherever it exists and give it room to grow.
“Smart people, talented people, skilled people exist everywhere,” Yaghi has said. “That’s why we should focus on unleashing their potential through opportunity.”
For alumni and students at UAlbany, Yaghi’s story is more than a celebration of scientific excellence. It is a reminder of what can happen when curiosity meets opportunity — when a student is given access to labs, mentors and the freedom to explore. Marlene Belfort, distinguished professor of biomedical and biological sciences and senior advisor at UAlbany’s RNA Institute, sees that continuity clearly.
“I’ve known of Omar’s groundbreaking research for years,” she said. “Watching as he built his illustrious career after receiving his BS in chemistry from UAlbany has been deeply inspiring.”
Today, Yaghi’s work spans continents and disciplines. Yet the arc of his career traces back to a teenager in upstate New York, learning a new language and discovering that the laboratory could be a place where ideas — and people — take shape.