Who is Omar Yaghi? Nobel Prize-winning scientist leaves US to join Chinese research university; here’s why

Nobel Prize-winning material scientist Omar Yaghi has joined China’s Tsinghua University to lead a new AI-driven research center. The 61-year-old chemist will head a team working on ways artificial intelligence (AI) can transform the design and synthesis of new materials and shorten their development cycle “by orders of magnitude," Tsinghua University said on Friday, according to the South China Morning Post (SCMP).

The move, first reported by the SCMP, comes at a time when the administration of President Donald Trump has been pushing to cut US science spending and restrict international research partnerships. That tension became clear this fiscal year as Trump pursued sharp reductions in federal research budgets across government agencies.

Yaghi, who previously served as the James and Neeltje Tretter Professor of Chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley, already had ties to Tsinghua University as an honorary professor since 2022, but he was formally welcomed as a full‑time faculty member during a ceremony on July 3, 2026. according to the scientific journal Nature.


During his appointment ceremony, Yaghi said he hoped to develop materials to tackle major environmental challenges such as water shortages, carbon neutrality, and sustainable development. He added that he also wanted to help train young scientists in AI-driven chemistry.

Yaghi’s Nobel Prize

Yaghi shared the 2025 Nobel Prize with Richard Robson and Susumu Kitagawa for their work on metal-organic frameworks, which are ultra-porous, spongelike materials created by linking metal ions with carbon-based molecules. According to the Nobel Prize website, “Metal–organic frameworks (MOFs) are porous materials in which metal ions and long carbon-based molecules form crystals with built-in cavities. By varying the building blocks, specific substances can be captured and stored inside the cavities.”

“Following pioneering work by Richard Robson, around the turn of the millennium, Omar Yaghi and Susumu Kitagawa developed more flexible and stable MOFs. These are possible to use, for example, to harvest water from desert air, capture carbon dioxide, store toxic gases, or catalyse chemical reactions,” the website further stated.

Who is Omar Yaghi?

Born in Amman, Jordan, to a Palestinian refugee family in 1965, Yaghi was moved to the United States at the age of fifteen. He went on to earn his PhD in chemistry from the University of Illinois Urbana‑Champaign and later held faculty positions at Arizona State University, the University of Michigan, and the University of California, Los Angeles, before joining Berkeley.

Alongside his US career, Yaghi built strong ties with China, becoming a foreign member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, winning the Nano Research Award multiple times, and establishing long‑standing collaborations with leading universities such as Tsinghua, Nanjing, Fudan, and Shanghai Jiao Tong.

In 2025, Yaghi in an interview with The New York Times expressed concerns about Trump’s immigration policies, noting that they endanger the country’s system of universities, companies and governments that promote scientific excellence. “I think it’s regrettable,” he said of Trump’s nationalism.