Omar Yaghi, an immigrant to the United States who shared last year's Nobel Prize in Chemistry, has left his faculty post at the University of California, Berkeley, for a full-time position at Tsinghua University in Beijing, where he will lead a new institute applying artificial intelligence to accelerate materials discovery.
The move, reported by The New York Times and Nature, comes amid the Trump administration's continuing disruptions of U.S. science funding and China's aggressive efforts to recruit top international scientists with substantial budgets. Last week, Tsinghua held an appointment ceremony welcoming Yaghi as one of "the world's foremost chemists."
Yaghi won the Nobel Prize for his discovery of metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) — molecular structures with vast internal surface areas that can act like sponges to absorb, store and release gases. The technology has led to innovations in water harvesting from desert air, carbon capture, and energy storage. A device based on his work that can produce drinking water from dry air is nearing commercialization.
At Tsinghua, Yaghi will head an AI institute for science research focused on designing and synthesizing new materials, aiming to "overcome the efficiency bottlenecks of traditional trial-and-error approaches" and dramatically shorten discovery cycles.
His departure underscores a worrying trend for U.S. science: China has been outperforming the U.S. in top chemistry papers, and three of America's six Nobel science winners in 2025 were born abroad. Ram Seshadri, a professor at UC Santa Barbara, noted: "They've overtaken us in many areas of materials science and chemistry. They're willing to invest very large sums of money to attract new talent."
