Real Lives
Omar Yaghi carried a refugee childhood without water to a Nobel
Graphic: Times of Palestine
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The boy shared one room with his siblings and the family's livestock, in a house in Amman where clean water was scarce. Sixty years later the chemistry he invented pulls drinking water out of desert air.
Omar Mwannes Yaghi was born on 9 February 1965 to a Palestinian refugee family from Masmiya, the village between Jaffa and Jerusalem that his parents fled in 1948. He grew up in Jordan, in the crowded conditions the Nakba left behind, and at fifteen his father sent him to the United States to study with almost no English.
He began at Hudson Valley Community College, took an associate degree in 1983, a chemistry degree from the State University of New York at Albany in 1985, and a doctorate from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1990. Then Harvard, then Arizona State, Michigan, UCLA and Berkeley, where he is a University Professor.
What he actually built#
Yaghi founded a field. Reticular chemistry is the practice of joining molecular building blocks with strong bonds into open crystalline frameworks — structures full of ordered empty space. When he began, the chemistry establishment considered it unworkable.
Between 1995 and 1999 he turned fragile laboratory curiosities into metal-organic frameworks: rigid, permanently porous crystals with enormous internal surface area. A single gram of some of them carries an internal surface area measured in thousands of square metres. He went on to build covalent organic frameworks in two dimensions in 2005 and three in 2007.
The applications follow from the emptiness. A material that is mostly ordered pore can hold gases, separate them, catalyse reactions inside itself — and grab water molecules out of dry air, then release them with nothing more than low-grade heat. The World Economic Forum named that water harvesting one of its top ten emerging technologies in 2018.
The prizes, and the room in Amman#
The Wolf Prize in Chemistry came in 2018, the Albert Einstein World Award of Science in 2017, the King Faisal International Prize in 2015, the Gregori Aminoff Prize in 2019, the Tang Prize and the Balzan Prize in 2024. In 2025 he shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Richard Robson and Susumu Kitagawa, for the development of metal-organic frameworks.
He has founded companies to move the work out of the laboratory — Atoco in 2020 for carbon capture and atmospheric water harvesting, H2MOF in 2021 for hydrogen storage.
It is not sentimental to draw the line from the room in Amman to the water harvester. A chemist who grew up without enough clean water spent his career building a material that takes it out of the air, and the biography and the work sit in the same sentence without needing to be forced there.
Why this belongs in a Palestinian paper this week#
Yesterday this paper reported a Gaza family's water run — the daily walk, the queue, the six litres a person.
Yaghi's frameworks are not a solution to that. Gaza's water crisis is made of destroyed desalination plants, cut pipes and blocked fuel, and no material invented at Berkeley repairs a pipeline an army has broken. The West Bank communities losing their wells in the Jordan Valley this month are losing them to bulldozers, not to physics.
But the man who did more than anyone alive to make water out of air was born to people driven out of a Palestinian village, in a household that did not have enough of it. That is worth saying plainly, in the register the achievement deserves. The Palestinian record includes this.
