Nobel Laureate Prof. Omar Yaghi, Atoco’s Founder and Chief Science Officer, Featured in New Scientist
In this interview published on 27 January 2026, Nobel Laureate Prof. Omar Yaghi explains how reticular materials enable transformative technologies such as atmospheric water harvesting or carbon capture. Many thanks to Karmela Padavic-Callaghan for the interview.
Civilisations name their ages after materials. In school, we learn about the Stone Age, the Bronze Age – and we are currently in a silicon age characterised by computers and phones. What might define the next age? Omar Yaghi at the University of California, Berkeley, thinks a family of materials he helped pioneer in the 1990s has a good shot. They are metal-organic frameworks (MOFs), and working out how to make them earned him a share of the 2025 Nobel prize in chemistry.
MOFs, and their cousins covalent organic frameworks (COFs), are crystalline materials, but what sets them apart is their incredible porosity. In 1999, Yaghi and his colleagues made a splash when they synthesised a zinc-based material called MOF-5 that was so riddled with pores that a couple of grams of it had an internal surface area comparable to a football field (see diagram below). The inside of the material was effectively an awful lot larger than its outside.