2025 Nobel Prize in Chemistry

The 2025 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded jointly to Susumu Kitagawa, Richard Robson and Omar M. Yaghi for the development of metal–organic frameworks (MOFs). Committee highlights how MOFs created a new class of porous, designable materials with broad applications. Click HERE to read more on this award.

Key details from the Nobel Committee

• Discovery: The Nobel Committee awarded the prize “for the development of metal–organic frameworks,” recognizing the trio’s foundational work in creating crystalline materials built from metal nodes and organic linkers that form highly porous, tunable networks. The Committee frames MOFs as a new form of molecular architecture—ordered, crystalline frameworks with exceptionally large internal surface areas and controllable pore environments, enabling selective capture, storage and transformation of molecules. The laureates established reticular chemistry—the deliberate stitching of molecular building blocks into extended structures—turning what were once curiosities into a systematic, designable field of materials chemistry (part of Materials Science).

• Impact:

-The 2025 Chemistry Prize recognizes a paradigm shift—from serendipitous porous crystals to a mature, design-driven discipline that bridges molecular chemistry and large-scale applications.

-MOFs are both a conceptual advance and a practical platform with continuing influence across energy, environment and medicine.

Why This Matters

• Fundamental impact: MOFs transformed how chemists think about building materials from the bottom up. Their modularity lets researchers design pore size, shape and chemical functionality with molecular precision, a capability that opened a new branch of chemistry and materials science.

• Practical applications: MOFs are already used or explored for gas storage and separation (including hydrogen and carbon dioxide), catalysis, sensing, drug delivery and water purification—areas with direct environmental, energy and health implications.

• Enabling technologies: By providing exceptionally high surface areas and tailorability, MOFs offer routes to more efficient capture of greenhouse gases, compact storage of fuels, and selective chemical transformations that can reduce energy use in industrial processes.