A University of California, Berkeley chemistry professor was awarded the 2025 Nobel Prize in Chemistry on Wednesday for developing metal-organic frameworks or molecular structures that can trap, store, and filter gases, with applications ranging from clean water to carbon capture.

Omar Yaghi, 60, was born on Feb. 9, 1965 in Amman, Jordan. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 1990.

Yaghi shares the prize with Susumu Kitagawa of Kyoto University in Japan and Richard Robson of the University of Melbourne in Australia. In a statement, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences cited the trio “for the development of metal-organic frameworks,” or MOFs, which it called a breakthrough in molecular construction.

According to the academy, the scientists’ work created

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