UAlbany, HVCC alum gets Nobel Prize in Chemistry

ALBANY, N.Y. (NEWS10) — A University at Albany and Hudson Valley Community College alum has been awarded the 2025 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Omar M. Yaghi shares this honor with Susumu Kitagawa of Kyoto University and Richard Robson of the University of Melbourne.

This year, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences recognized these three researchers for their development of metal-organic frameworks, which are porous molecular architectures with a vast internal surface area that have the ability to capture, store, and transform gases like hydrogen, carbon dioxide, and water vapor.

Yaghi moved to the U.S. at 15 years old and eventually settled in Troy to pursue his education. He earned his associate in science degree at HVCC in 1983 and his bachelor’s degree in chemistry from UAlbany in 1985, where he graduated cum laude.

The Nobel Prize awardee went on to earn his PhD in chemistry from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and completed a National Science Foundation postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard University. He currently resides at the University of California, Berkeley, where he is the James and Neeltje Tretter Chair Professor of Chemistry. Yaghi is also the founding director of the Berkeley Global Science Institute.