UCLA Chemistry & Biochemistry Center for Reticular Chemistry California NanoSystems Institute

Omar M. Yaghi



Professor, Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry, UCLA
PhD, University of Illinois-Urbana; NSF Postdoctoral Fellow, Harvard University

Email: yaghi@chem.ucla.edu

Learn more about Professor Yaghi in recent interviews:
interview 1  |  interview 2


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Omar M. Yaghi was born in Amman, Jordan (1965). He received his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois-Urbana (1990) with Professor Walter G. Klemperer. He was an NSF Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard University (1990-92) with Professor Richard H. Holm. He then joined the faculty at Arizona State University in 1992 as Assistant Professor and received the ACS-Exxon Solid-State Chemistry Award in 1998. He moved to the University of Michigan as the Robert W. Parry Collegiate Professor of Chemistry (1999) and shortly thereafter was awarded the Sacconi Medal by the Inorganic Division of the Italian Chemical Society. Since January 2006, he has been the Christopher S. Foote Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry at UCLA, Director of the Center for Reticular Chemistry, and Director of the Clean Energy Network at the California NanoSystems Institute, UCLA. Recently he was listed among the "Brilliant 10" in the USA by Popular Science magazine, and received Materials Research Society Medal for pioneering work in the theory, design, synthesis and applications of metal-organic frameworks and the AAAS Newcomb Cleveland Prize for the best paper published in Science (2006-2007) and for outstanding contributions to Science. He has published over 100 papers which have received an average of over 100 citations per paper. He is listed among the top 0.25% cited chemists worldwide for his work on the design and construction of chemical structures using the molecular building blocks. This work has led to a number of new classes of useful porous materials such as metal-organic frameworks, covalent organic frameworks, and zeolitic imidazolate frameworks. His research program focuses on the basic science of porous discrete and extended structures and their applications in clean energy (hydrogen storage, methane storage, carbon dioxide capture), mechanical switching, catalysis, and gas separation technologies.

Omar M. Yaghi
Christopher S. Foote Chair Professor
UCLA Department of Chem. and Biochem.
607 East Charles E. Young Dr.
Los Angeles, CA 90095-1569
Tel: 310-206-0398
Fax: 310-206-5891

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