Stockholm: The Nobel Prize in Chemistry for 2025 has been awarded to Susumu Kitagawa, Richard Robson and Omar M Yaghi. “The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the 2025 #NobelPrize in Chemistry to Susumu Kitagawa, Richard Robson and Omar M Yaghi ‘for the development of metal-organic frameworks,’ the post on X announced this afternoon.
The three chemists will share the 11 million Swedish crowns prize money — around Rs 10 crore in Indian currency, besides the prestige that the Nobel prize carries.
Kitagawa, who holds a PhD in hydrocarbon chemistry from Japan’s Kyoto University, has earlier won awards such as the Humboldt Research Prize (2008) and the De Gennes Prize. He currently teaches at Kyoto University.
Robson, who was born in the UK and studied chemistry at the University of Oxford, now teaches at the University of Melbourne.
Yaghi was born in Amman, Jordan, completed his PhD from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in the US and is now teaching at the University of California, Berkeley in the US.
“These constructions, metal-organic frameworks, can be used to harvest water from desert air, capture carbon dioxide, store toxic gases or catalyse chemical reactions,” the jury said, elaborating on the work of the three winners.
“Metal-organic frameworks have enormous potential, bringing previously unforeseen opportunities for custom-made materials with new functions,” Heiner Linke, chair of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry, said in a statement.
Last year, the Nobel Prize for chemistry went to David Baker and John Jumper, together with Briton Demis Hassabis, for work on cracking the code of the structure of proteins through computing and artificial intelligence. The Nobel Prize for literature will be announced tomorrow, and the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday.