Nobel-winning chemist born to Palestinian refugees grew up with 9 siblings in one room without running water or electricity; after moving to the US in 1980, he developed technology to harvest water from dry desert air without electricity

For a child growing up in a place where water arrived only once every week or two, a few hours of running water could determine the rhythm of an entire household. Containers had to be filled quickly. Water had to last. Even an ordinary shower could become a luxury.

That was the childhood reality of Omar M. Yaghi, who was born in Amman, Jordan, in 1965 to Palestinian refugee parents. He grew up with his siblings in a single room without electricity or running water, according to the Nobel Prize's account of his early life. As a boy, he was responsible for collecting enough water to last until the next supply arrived.

Decades later, Yaghi became a Nobel Prize-winning chemist whose work helped create materials capable of pulling water molecules from the air. In 2025, he shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Susumu Kitagawa and Richard Robson for the development of metal-organic frameworks, or MOFs. The materials can potentially be used to harvest water from desert air, capture carbon dioxide and store gases.


The journey from a child waiting for water in the Jordanian capital to a chemist designing materials that can capture water from dry air is remarkable. But Yaghi's own account suggests that the connection was not simply about solving a childhood problem. It began with something much more basic: his fascination with the beauty of chemistry.

A childhood where every drop of water mattered

Yaghi has described water scarcity as something he understood long before he became a scientist. In an interview with Al Jazeera in January this year, he recalled that water came to his family's home once a week, and sometimes once every two weeks, for only a few hours. When the supply arrived, the family had to rush to fill every container they could. That water then had to last until the next delivery. He also recalled growing up in one room with his 9 siblings and livestock.

In the interview, he adds another important detail. Yaghi's parents were refugees from Palestine, but currently have 4 citizenships.

“My family comes from a small village called Masmiya in Palestine, and we lived as refugees in Amman, Jordan, where I was born and raised. So I have a Jordanian citizenship and Saudi Arabia gave me an honorary citizenship, and I live in the United States where I am a US citizen.”

Also Read: A lamp maker from Philadelphia sat motionless for 15 minutes in front of a homemade camera built with opera glass and copper in 1839; his picture became the first ‘selfie’ ever taken

His father had completed sixth grade, and his mother could not read or write. At the age of 10, Yaghi discovered chemistry almost by accident when he entered a school library and opened a book containing drawings of molecular structures. Those unfamiliar shapes fascinated him.

That moment would eventually lead him far beyond the circumstances of his childhood.

At 15, Yaghi moved to the United States to continue his education. The Nobel Prize says he later became interested in designing materials more systematically, eventually developing the chemistry that would make MOFs one of the most important areas of modern materials science.

The chemistry that creates tiny 'rooms' inside materials

To understand Yaghi's invention, it helps to imagine a material filled with an enormous number of microscopic rooms. MOFs are crystalline structures made by connecting metal ions with long carbon-based molecules. The resulting framework contains cavities and pores. By changing the molecular building blocks, scientists can design those spaces to interact with particular molecules. That is what made Yaghi's work so significant.

Instead of simply discovering substances with useful properties, his approach enabled chemists to design materials for specific tasks. The pores could be engineered to capture, store or separate particular molecules.

The Nobel Prize's scientific background describes this as a major change in chemistry because researchers had historically found it difficult to construct extended two- and three-dimensional structures with the same level of precision used to design individual molecules. Yaghi's work helped change that.

This became the foundation of what Yaghi calls reticular chemistry, the practice of linking molecular building blocks into larger, ordered structures using strong chemical bonds.

From a laboratory crystal to a machine that makes water

Yaghi has described the development of MOFs as a process that began with curiosity rather than a finished plan to solve the world's water crisis. In a January 2026 interview with New Scientist, he recalled: “At the beginning, I was just excited to make beautiful crystals.” He said the significance of the materials became clearer after researchers began observing their unusual properties and asking what they could do with them.

That progression is central to understanding Yaghi's scientific career. The crystals were not designed solely as water machines. Their enormous internal surface areas and precisely controlled pores opened possibilities for storing gases, capturing carbon dioxide and separating molecules. Water harvesting emerged as one particularly striking application.

Also Read: A Wisconsin newspaper publisher in 1866 tried to automate ticket numbering. Then one question from a fellow inventor eventually helped create the typewriter and QWERTY keyboard we still use today

The Nobel Prize notes that just a small amount of MOF material can contain a surprisingly large internal surface area because of all the microscopic cavities inside it. In one example highlighted in the Nobel materials, a few grams of MOF can have an internal surface area comparable to that of a football pitch.

The machine does not literally create water from nothing

The phrase "water from air" can make the technology sound like science fiction. The underlying process is more straightforward.

The atmosphere already contains water vapor. The MOF acts like a highly engineered sponge at the molecular level, selectively attracting water molecules into its pores.

Atoco, the company Yaghi founded to commercialize his research, says its atmospheric water-harvesting systems use reticular materials to capture water vapor and release it with low-grade thermal energy. Its current technology includes systems designed to operate without external electricity by using low-grade waste heat, with the company stating capacities of up to 1,000 liters per day for such off-grid units.

That is an important distinction: the technology does not manufacture H₂O. It extracts water that is already present in the atmosphere. And the amount produced depends on factors such as humidity, temperature, material performance and system design.

Why Yaghi's childhood matters to the story

It would be tempting to describe Yaghi's career as a simple story of a boy who lacked water and grew up to invent a way of producing it. The reality is more complicated and arguably more interesting.

Yaghi did not begin his career with a water machine in mind. His fascination started with molecular structures. The Nobel Prize says that a chance encounter with a chemistry book at about age 10 introduced him to molecular drawings, which captivated him.

But his childhood experience gave him an unusually personal understanding of scarcity.

In his own recollection, collecting water was one of his responsibilities as a child. Years later, when he was studying the properties of porous materials, the possibility of capturing atmospheric water gave that fundamental chemistry a connection to a problem he already knew intimately.

In a 2019 lecture, Yaghi described the transition from molecular structures to water harvesting as an example of how chemistry could address a major global problem. The lecture also explains that his childhood in Amman had made him familiar with water arriving only every couple of weeks and the need to collect enough for the household and livestock.

Also Read: NASA sent 3 aluminum LEGO figures on a 1.7 billion mile journey; by 2016, the figurines of 2 Roman gods and 1 famous scientist had become the fastest and farthest-traveling toys in history. Still orbiting Jupiter, they now face a fiery fate

From MOFs to carbon capture and clean energy

Water is only one part of the story. The same molecular architecture can be designed to interact with other substances. MOFs can capture gases such as carbon dioxide, store hydrogen and methane, separate chemicals and support catalytic reactions. The Nobel Prize specifically identifies carbon capture, gas storage and catalysis among their possible applications.

The scientist who moved from refugee childhood to the Nobel stage

Yaghi's career eventually took him from Jordan to the United States and into some of the highest levels of scientific research. He earned his PhD from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 1990 and became a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. The Nobel Prize was awarded to him in 2025, alongside Kitagawa and Robson, for the development of metal-organic frameworks. However, he moved to China in July 2026 to join Tsinghua University full-time as a Chair Professor and lead a newly established university-level AI Chemistry and Materials Research Institute (AIMATRY).