At age 10, Omar Yaghi walked into a school library in Amman, Jordan, and opened a book that changed his life. He saw molecular drawings — complex structures he didn’t yet understand, but which immediately captivated him. "I thought I discovered something that nobody had ever seen before," Yaghi recalls.

Yaghi, now a professor of chemistry at UC Berkeley, shared this story during a recent Brilliance of Berkeley lecture to illustrate how a life defined by scarcity can be transformed through the pursuit of science.

Growing up in a family of 10 children, Yaghi lived in a single room that lacked electricity and running water. The family shared their living quarters with cattle, separated from the animals only by sacks of feed. Education was the family's singular priority; his parents spent everything they earned to keep their children in school to ensure they had a path toward a different future.

In 2025, Yaghi was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the development of metal-organic frameworks, or MOFs — porous materials that act like "molecular sponges" capable of capturing carbon dioxide from the air and harvesting water from desert humidity.

In this Berkeley Talks episode, Yaghi describes how his childhood as a refugee and his early days as an immigrant in the U.S. shaped his relentless work ethic. He recounts the "failure" of a yearlong graduate school experiment that actually resulted in his first major discovery: a ball-shaped molecule that paved the way for his career. Today, his research on reticular chemistry continues to push toward real-world solutions to the climate crisis.

For Yaghi, science is not only about discovery, but about transforming access to life’s most basic resource. “My dream,” he says, is “for everyone to have water independence — where your water is yours, independent of everything else.”

This lecture, which took place on Jan. 23, was part of LNS 110: Brilliance of Berkeley, a course featuring distinguished researchers working on the world’s most pressing issues.

Listen to the episode and read the transcript on UC Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu/podcasts/berkeley-talks).

Music by HoliznaCC0.

Photo by Brittany Hosea-Small for UC Berkeley.

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