Overview
- The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences recognized their development of MOFs, a tunable molecular architecture built from metal nodes and organic linkers with vast internal cavities.
- The trio will share 11 million Swedish kronor as this year’s chemistry laureates.
- Robson pioneered the frameworks in 1989, Kitagawa showed gas adsorption and flexibility in the 1990s, and Yaghi later created stable, designable MOFs that spread the field.
- Researchers have since synthesized tens of thousands of MOFs for tasks such as harvesting water from desert air, capturing CO2, removing PFAS, storing hydrogen, and catalyzing reactions.
- The laureates are affiliated with Kyoto University, the University of Melbourne, and the University of California, Berkeley, and the committee hailed the materials’ “enormous potential.”