Nobel laureate Omar Yaghi urges Saudi youth to seize investments in education

Nobel laureate Omar Yaghi was featured in a special interview on Al Arabiya English (watch, runtime: 15:49) on Tuesday. Chemist Yaghi received last Wednesday a Nobel Prize in the sciences, after being awarded the 2025 Nobel Prize in Chemistry alongside Japan’s Susumu Kitagawa and Australia’s Richard Robson for pioneering metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) — materials that can trap, store, and release gases such as carbon dioxide and hydrogen.

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Yaghi explained his revolutionary approach to MOFs by comparing it to building with Legos. His model was to “take molecules like building blocks and put them together to make different forms... Once you build materials, and in this case, we have basically opened a gold mine where any molecule could be stitched together to make a new material,” he said.

Looking ahead, Yaghi unveiled ambitions to create “MOFs that operate like DNA, meaning that they have sequences of information that code for very specific properties.” With the rapid development of AI tools, “we have preliminary results that show that we can speed up the discovery of new materials…50-fold faster than what we have been doing,” he revealed.

The Jordan-born scientist urged the Saudi youth to seize the Kingdom’s investments in education, take risks, and innovate, saying that “experiment is paramount to discovery.” He also extended gratitude to King Abdulaziz City of Science and Technology for their "scientific collaboration over the last many years.”