Nobel Laureate Omar Yaghi Joins Tsinghua University to Lead AI-Driven Materials Research Center

On July 3, 2026, Omar Yaghi was formally welcomed as a full-time faculty member at Tsinghua University in Beijing, according to the journal Nature. The 61-year-old chemist, who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2025, will lead a new research center built around artificial intelligence and the making of new materials.

Tsinghua said on Friday that the team will study how AI can change the design and synthesis of materials, and cut their development cycle "by orders of magnitude." The South China Morning Post first reported the move, and The Economic Times relayed it.

Yaghi was not a stranger to the university. He had been an honorary professor at Tsinghua since 2022. Before the full-time appointment, he held the James and Neeltje Tretter Professor of Chemistry chair at the University of California, Berkeley.

At the appointment ceremony, Yaghi said he hoped to develop materials that address large environmental problems: water shortages, carbon neutrality and sustainable development. He added that he wants to help train young scientists in AI-driven chemistry.

His Nobel came in 2025, shared with Richard Robson and Susumu Kitagawa, for work on metal-organic frameworks, or MOFs. These are porous, spongelike crystals in which metal ions and long carbon-based molecules form built-in cavities. By changing the building blocks, researchers can capture and store specific substances inside those spaces. The Nobel website says Robson did the pioneering work, and that around the turn of the millennium Yaghi and Kitagawa developed more flexible and stable versions. Possible uses include harvesting water from desert air, capturing carbon dioxide, storing toxic gases and catalysing chemical reactions.

Yaghi was born in Amman, Jordan, in 1965 to a Palestinian refugee family and moved to the United States at fifteen. He earned his PhD in chemistry at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, then held faculty posts at Arizona State University, the University of Michigan and UCLA before reaching Berkeley.

His ties to China run alongside that American career. He is a foreign member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, has won the Nano Research Award multiple times, and has long collaborated with Tsinghua, Nanjing University, Fudan University and Shanghai Jiao Tong University.

The timing falls against a political backdrop. The administration of President Donald Trump has been pushing to cut US science spending and restrict international research partnerships, and this fiscal year it pursued sharp reductions in federal research budgets across agencies. In a 2025 interview with The New York Times, Yaghi voiced concern about Trump's immigration policies, saying they endanger the system of universities, companies and governments that promotes scientific excellence. Of Trump's nationalism, he said, "I think it's regrettable."

What to watch: whether the center's AI methods actually shorten materials development as Tsinghua claims, and whether other US-based scientists make similar moves.