Session Abstract
Our ability to capture, store, manipulate, and harness the power of carbon dioxide and water molecules in an efficient and economical manner is paramount to our success in building a sustainable future. The emerging field of reticular materials has yielded extensive classes of ultra-porous metal-organic frameworks and covalent organic frameworks. The flexibility with which these materials can be made, modified, and scaled bodes well for their integration into devices and providing robust solutions to these challenges. In this presentation, I will highlight how reticular materials have led us to make frameworks for carbon capture from air and flue gas, as well as for harvesting water from air to produce drinking water in various parts of the world regardless of temperature and humidity levels. Our efforts in taking this technology from the laboratory to the field including the design and engineering of prototypes and applying AI tools to speed up discovery will be discussed and the results presented.
Speaker Bio
He received his Ph.D. in Chemistry from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and was an NSF Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard University. He is a University Professor and the James and Neeltje Tretter Professor of Chemistry at University of California, Berkeley. He is the Founding Director of the Berkeley Global Science Institute whose mission is to build centers of research in developing countries and provide opportunities for young scholars to discover and learn. He is also the Co-Director of the Kavli Energy NanoSciences Institute (Kavli ENSI) focusing on the basic science of energy transformation on the molecular level, the California Research Alliance by BASF (CARA) supporting joint academia-industry innovations, as well as the Bakar Institute of Digital Materials for the Planet (BIDMaP) which aims to develop cost-efficient, easily deployable versions of two classes of ultra porous materials – known as metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) and covalent organic frameworks (COFs) – to help limit and address the impacts of climate change.
His work encompasses the synthesis, structure and properties of inorganic and organic compounds and the design and construction of new crystalline materials. He is widely known for pioneering several extensive classes of new materials: Metal-Organic Frameworks (MOFs), Covalent Organic Frameworks (COFs), and Zeolitic Imidazolate Frameworks (ZIFs). These materials have the highest surface areas known to date, making them useful for hydrogen and methane storage, carbon capture and conversion, water harvesting from desert air, and catalysis, to mention a few. The building block approach he developed has led to an exponential growth in the creation of new materials having a diversity and multiplicity previously unknown in chemistry. He termed this field Reticular Chemistry; and defines it as stitching molecular building blocks into extended structures by strong bonds. His work on MOFs, COFs, and ZIFs led to over 300 published articles, which have received a total of more than 250,000 citations and an h-index of 190. Yaghi is an elected member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina. He has also been honored with many awards, including the Sacconi Medal of the Italian Chemical Society (2004), Materials Research Society Medal (2007), American Chemical Society Award in the Chemistry of Materials (2009), Royal Society of Chemistry Centenary Prize (2010), King Faisal International Prize in Science (2015), Albert Einstein World Award of Science (2017), BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Basic Sciences (2017), Wolf Prize in Chemistry (2018), Eni Award for Excellence in Energy (2018), Gregori Aminoff Prize by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences (2019), August-Wilhelm-von-Hofmann-Denkmünze of the German Chemical Society (2020), Royal Society of Chemistry Sustainable Water Award (2020), VinFuture Prize (2021), Wilhelm Exner Medal (2023), Solvay Prize (2024), Tang Prize (2024), Balzan Prize (2024), IUPAC-Soong Prize for Sustainable Chemistry (2025), MRS Von Hippel Award (2025), and Nobel Prize in Chemistry (2025).