The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced on October 8, 2025, the decision to award the Nobel Prize in Chemistry to Susumu Kitagawa, Richard Robson, and Omar M. Yaghi. This high honor recognizes their foundational work in developing and understanding Metal-Organic Frameworks (MOFs), a class of materials expected to revolutionize resource management and environmental remediation efforts globally. The official award ceremony is scheduled to take place in Stockholm, Sweden, on December 10, 2025.
MOFs are sophisticated, crystalline structures built by linking metal ions with organic molecules. This assembly process creates highly porous networks with exceptionally large internal surface areas. The key innovation lies in the tunability of these frameworks, allowing scientists to engineer precise cavities and properties for specific functions. The Nobel Committee for Chemistry emphasized that MOFs open up unprecedented avenues for creating custom-engineered materials capable of addressing major systemic challenges facing humanity, including climate change mitigation and resource security. As Heiner Linke, Chairman of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry, noted, the potential of MOFs is enormous, opening up unprecedented opportunities for creating materials with new functions. By varying the building blocks, chemists have created tens of thousands of different MOF variants.
The practical potential of MOFs is already evident across several critical sectors. Researchers are designing these materials for highly efficient capture of atmospheric carbon dioxide, a vital component of climate stabilization strategies. Furthermore, their unique porous nature makes them excellent candidates for the safe and dense storage of hydrogen fuel, thereby supporting the transition toward cleaner energy sources. Beyond energy and atmosphere, MOFs are proving instrumental in purification, capable of filtering persistent water pollutants such as PFAS and even extracting potable water from arid regions. In 2022, Omar Yaghi's group tested MOFs in Death Valley, where 1 kg of material was able to extract 114 to 210 grams of water from dry air per day. Omar Yaghi founded the startup Atoco in 2020, aimed at commercializing MOF technologies for carbon capture and atmospheric water harvesting.
The scale of these materials' capacity is staggering; certain MOFs have demonstrated a surface area equivalent to a football field within just a few grams (as demonstrated by MOF-5, introduced by Yaghi in 1999), explaining their superior capabilities in gas storage and separation. The development of these frameworks accelerated significantly following foundational work spanning decades, particularly with researchers like Richard Robson, who first synthesized a porous coordination polymer in 1989, and Omar Yaghi, who achieved crystallization of metal-organic structures in 1995 and introduced MOF-5 in 1999, , making complex structures more accessible. Susumu Kitagawa also advanced this field by demonstrating that frameworks can be made flexible and their "breathing" controlled. This Nobel recognition validates the sustained, focused inquiry into materials science, confirming that the architecture of MOFs is a cornerstone for future technological evolution and collective well-being.