Nobel-winning chemist leaves US to direct AI materials lab in China

Nobel prizewinner Omar Yaghi has left the United States for a full-time position at Tsinghua University in Beijing, where he will lead a new artificial-intelligence-assisted materials discovery institute.

The move, first reported by the South China Morning Post, comes as the administration of President Donald Trump continues its attempts to slash US science spending and to limit international research partnerships. Some nations, including China, have responded by trying to lure in US talent with the promise of money and support. Earlier this year, for instance, France announced that it would award funds to dozens of US scientists relocating there. Meanwhile, China has been wooing international researchers with talent-recruitment programmes, and some of its cities and provinces are even offering researchers lump sums and monthly allowances to relocate within their borders.

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Yaghi already had a connection to Tsinghua University before the move — he became an honorary professor there in 2022. But he was officially welcomed as a full-time faculty member during a ceremony held on 3 July.

Yaghi was unavailable to speak to Nature for this story. However, in an interview with Scientific American last month, he said that the current state of US science is “not so encouraging because of the cutting back on grants” as well as the drop in support from US science agencies. He also voiced concerns that US researchers were not embracing what he sees as an “artificial-intelligence revolution”. Researchers need to engage with AI models, he said, “as a matter of survival of the advanced research system in the US”.

A materials pioneer

Born in Amman, Jordan, to Palestinian refugees, Yaghi moved to the United States at the age of 15 and lived there until he moved to China earlier this year. He is best known for developing metal–organic framework (MOF) compounds — highly porous materials whose vast internal surface areas make them capable of storing gases and serving as catalysts for chemical reactions, among other functions. Chemists have created more than 100,000 types of MOF, with an eye towards putting them to use in a range of commercial applications, including harvesting water from the air and delivering drugs into the body.

Yaghi — who became a faculty member at the University of California (UC), Berkeley in 2012 — has earned a slew of awards for his contributions to materials science, including the Albert Einstein World Award of Science and a share of both the Wolf Prize in Chemistry and, last year, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. He has also founded or co-founded several US companies, including Atoco in Irvine, California, which is developing materials that can be used for water-vapour harvesting and carbon capture, and WaHa in Fremont, California, which has created a device that turns “humidity into pure water while cutting energy costs for climate control”, according to the company’s website.

Yaghi stepped down from WaHa’s board in 2022, says Frank Ramirez, co-founder and chief executive of the company, adding that its business will be unaffected by Yaghi’s move to China.

As for Atoco, Yaghi’s move will keep him more involved with the company than ever before, says chief executive Samer Taha. Atoco is collaborating with the Yaghi Science Initiative, a non-profit programme launched by the Nobel laureate to connect researchers across a number of countries and to support early-career researchers who are working to solve global challenges. Yaghi’s move to China is part of this global science initiative, Taha says, and it “will multiply the opportunities for transformative discoveries”.

Tackling complex problems

A possible motive behind Yaghi’s move could be that after winning his Nobel prize, he wants to “do something more” and “build a new paradigm of research by combining AI, chemistry and material sciences”, says Marina Zhang, a science-policy researcher at the University of Technology Sydney in Australia, who focuses on innovation in China.

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The goal of Tsinghua’s new institute, with Yaghi at the helm, is to “tackle complex problems beyond any single field”, and to bridge “Eastern and Western intellectual traditions for the benefit of all humankind”, says Lei Liu, who is the chair of the university’s chemistry department.