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A University of Melbourne professor is among a trio of international scientists to win the Nobel chemistry prize for developing a new form of molecular architecture, yielding materials that can help tackle challenges such as climate change and lack of fresh water.
The award committee announced the 2025 recipients were Australia’s Richard Robson, professor Susumu Kitagawa from Kyoto University in Japan, and professor Omar Yaghi at the University of California, Berkeley, in the United States.
What was the discovery?
The three laureates worked to create molecular constructions with large spaces through which gases and other chemicals can flow and that can be utilised to harvest water from desert air, capture carbon dioxide or store toxic gases.
The committee said some of these materials had a remarkably large surface area — a porous material roughly the size of a small sugar cube could contain as much surface area as a large football pitch.
“A small amount of such material can be almost like Hermione’s handbag in Harry Potter. It can store huge amounts of gas in a tiny volume,” said Olof Ramstrom, member of the Nobel committee for chemistry.
The chemists worked separately but added to each other’s breakthroughs, which began in 1989 with Robson.
After the discoveries, chemists have built tens of thousands of different MOFs (metal-organic frameworks), some of which “may contribute to solving some of humankind’s greatest challenges”, the academy said, adding that additional uses included separating toxic PFAS, or “forever chemicals”, from water and breaking down traces of pharmaceuticals in the environment.
The 88-year-old Robson, in a phone call with The Associated Press, said he was “very pleased of course and a bit stunned as well”.
“This is a major thing that happens late in life when I’m not really in a condition to withstand it all,” he said. “But here we are.”
Kitagawa, 74, spoke to the committee, and the media, over the phone after his win was announced.
“I’m deeply honoured and delighted that my long-standing research has been recognised,” he said.
Kitagawa is Japanese, Robson was born in Britain but moved to Australia in his late 20s, while Yaghi is Jordanian-American.
Yaghi, 60, whose parents were Palestinian refugees living in Amman, moved to the US as a teenager.
His team managed to create a crystal-like structure using metal atoms and showed that these structures were robust and durable, yet highly porous.
“That basically was the spark that ignited the field,” he said in comments included in a statement from the University of California, Berkeley.
The more than a century-old prize is awarded by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and the winners share 11 million Swedish crowns ($A1.8 million), as well as the fame of winning arguably the world’s most prestigious science award.
The chemistry Nobel was the third prize announced in the 2025 crop of awards following those for medicine and physics announced this week.
Established in the will of Swedish inventor and businessman Alfred Nobel, the prizes for achievements in science, literature and peace have been awarded since 1901, with a few interruptions mostly due to the world wars.
Nobel was himself a chemist and his developments in that field helped underpin the wealth he amassed from his invention of dynamite in the 19th century.
The economics prize is a later addition funded by the Swedish central bank.
The Nobel announcements continue with the literature prize on Thursday.
The Nobel Peace Prize will be announced on Friday and the economics prize on Monday.
