On the morning of July 3, Tsinghua University held the Appointment Ceremony for Professor Omar M. Yaghi as Chair Professor of Tsinghua University at the Main Building. Professor Omar M. Yaghi, 2025 Nobel Laureate in Chemistry and one of the world’s foremost chemists and materials scientists, has joined Tsinghua University on a full-time basis. Qiu Yong, Secretary of the CPC Tsinghua University Committee, and Li Luming, President of Tsinghua University, attended the ceremony. Several academicians, including Andrew Chi-Chih Yao, Gao Huajian, Chen Deliang, Li Yadong, Cheng Jinpei, Zhang Hongjie, and Li Jun, as well as representatives from other universities, also attended the ceremony. The ceremony was presided over by Wang Hongwei, Vice President of Tsinghua University.
Omar M. Yaghi (center) joins Qiu Yong (left) and Li Luming (right) for a commemorative photo.
Li Luming presents the appointment letter to Omar M. Yaghi.
Li Luming, on behalf of Tsinghua University, extended a warm welcome and sincere congratulations to Professor Omar M. Yaghi on his appointment to a full-time position at Tsinghua. He noted that high-caliber scholars are essential to enhancing a university’s educational quality and capacity for talent cultivation. In recent years, Tsinghua University has pursued its core strategy of strengthening the university through talent, actively attracting the world’s leading scholars and providing strong support for cultivating outstanding talent and achieving greater self-reliance and strength in science and technology. Li said that Professor Yaghi is one of the world’s foremost chemists and materials scientists and has long-standing ties with Tsinghua. He expressed the hope that Professor Yaghi would inject strong momentum into the high-quality development of Tsinghua’s chemistry discipline as it enters its new century, bring together multiple disciplines to focus on frontier and interdisciplinary fields, and jointly write a new chapter in Tsinghua’s journey toward the forefront of world-class universities.
Omar M. Yaghi delivers remarks.
Omar M. Yaghi said that when he was ten years old, he fell in love with molecules. That early passion for science, he said, led him to cross geographical and cultural boundaries, learn new ways of thinking, and develop a new field of science. Today, his work addresses some of the world's most pressing challenges, including water, carbon, sustainability, and the future of life on this planet. He noted that the journey of scientific research was not always easy, but that science has a remarkable way of turning uncertainty into discovery, teaching people to approach the unknown with curiosity, discipline, and courage. In choosing Tsinghua, he said he was ready to begin again at this great university, not to slow down, not to repeat what has already been done, but to do science with more energy, more intensity, and more ambition than ever before. He looked forward to working with colleagues at Tsinghua to address the challenges of the times, build new frontiers of knowledge, and ensure that scientific discovery serves the world. “The molecules are calling me forward once more — with renewed energy, renewed purpose, and deep gratitude for the people and the university that now become part of this new journey,” Yaghi said.
Andrew Chi-Chih Yao, Dean of the Institute for Interdisciplinary Information Sciences and Dean of the College of AI at Tsinghua University, and an Academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said he was deeply honored to witness such a joyful and meaningful occasion. AI for Science is a frontier area that Tsinghua has prioritized in its strategic development, he said, and Professor Yaghi’s pioneering work in AI-enabled materials science is highly aligned with the development directions of the Institute for Interdisciplinary Information Sciences and the College of AI. Yao said he looked forward to in-depth exchanges and collaboration with Professor Yaghi and his team, and to working together to produce more groundbreaking innovations.
Liu Lei, Chair of the Department of Chemistry, noted that 2026 marks the centenary of Tsinghua’s Department of Chemistry. Over the past century, he said, the department has remained rooted at the frontiers of science and committed to making breakthroughs. Standing at this new starting point, Liu said he looked forward to working side by side with Professor Yaghi to explore new breakthroughs at the frontiers of AI-enabled molecular materials science and to jointly scale new heights in the development of the discipline.
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Omar M. Yaghi is the 2025 Nobel Laureate in Chemistry. He is also a Foreign Member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a member of the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina. Born in Amman, Jordan, in 1965, he received his Ph.D. in Chemistry from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1990 and went on to conduct postdoctoral research at Harvard University. He has held faculty positions at several leading U.S. universities and joined the University of California, Berkeley in 2012, where he held the James and Neeltje Tretter Chair in Chemistry and also served as a Senior Faculty Scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Yaghi has received dozens of major international academic honors, including the Albert Einstein World Award of Science, the Wolf Prize in Chemistry, and the Balzan Prize.
Yaghi’s research spans the synthesis, structure and properties of inorganic and organic compounds, as well as the design and construction of new crystalline materials. His building-block approach has catalyzed exponential growth in the creation of new materials, generating unprecedented chemical diversity. He pioneered metal-organic frameworks (MOFs), covalent organic frameworks (COFs), and molecular weaving, and first defined “Reticular Chemistry” as a new field of research. To date, Yaghi has published more than 300 papers, with his work cited more than 260,000 times. More than 30 of his papers have appeared in Nature and Science.
Omar M. Yaghi has long-standing ties with Tsinghua University. On January 14, 2022, Tsinghua University appointed him as an Honorary Professor. Over the years, he has closely followed the development of Tsinghua’s chemistry, materials science and related disciplines, and the two sides have maintained close engagement in academic exchange and talent cultivation. After joining Tsinghua full-time, Yaghi will lead the establishment of a university-level AI Chemistry and Materials Research Institute, AIMATRY （AI × Materials × Chemistry). Building on the Department of Chemistry and the Department of Chemical Engineering, and working in close collaboration with the College of AI, the Department of Computer Science and Technology, the School of Materials Science and Engineering, and other schools and departments, the institute will develop forward-looking AI-enabled technologies for materials design and synthesis, with the aim of achieving an order-of-magnitude compression of new materials R&D cycles. It will build an intelligent R&D system spanning the full chain from theory and computation to R&D and production, seek to overcome the efficiency bottlenecks of traditional trial-and-error approaches, and establish an independent technical standards system covering the full lifecycle of intelligent materials. In talent cultivation, Yaghi will leverage his international influence to work with leading scholars in related fields to build an integrated AI+Chemistry teaching and research platform at Tsinghua. Through interdisciplinary courses, small-class teaching and practical training, the platform will continue to cultivate high-level interdisciplinary talent for emerging fields such as AI+materials chemistry.
Writer: Gillian Tang
Editor: John Paul Grima
