Balzan Lecture
Chemistry in the Age of Abundance Balzan Lecture by Omar Yaghi
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Venue: ETH Zurich main building, Room HG F 30 (Audi Max).
This is a public, free-of-charge event.
Registration is not needed and not offered.
Seats will be assigned on a first-come-first-served basis.
Omar Yaghi, winner of the 2024 Balzan Prize for Nanoporous Materials for Environmental Applications, will deliver a lecture co-hosted by the International Balzan Foundation and the Collegium Helveticum.
In the Balzan Lecture 2026, Omar Yaghi will discuss how today, chemists can make more molecules and materials with greater diversity and multiplicity than ever before. This is certainly true in reticular chemistry, where hundreds of thousands of metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) and covalent organic frameworks (COFs) have been reported. With AI and robotics, the ability to make more compounds is vastly expanded, raising the question of how chemists can transform their field from one of scarcity to one of abundance. Yaghi will also discuss how AI and robotics are being deployed in reticular chemistry to address the carbon capture and water challenges facing our planet.
Omar Yaghi was recognized by the International Balzan Foundation in 2024 for his groundbreaking contributions to the discovery and development of nanoporous framework materials, and advancing their applications in carbon capture, hydrogen storage, and water harvesting from desert air. Yaghi developed foundational design principles and innovative synthetic methods, creating two extensive classes of nanoporous materials: MOFs and COFs. These pioneering materials are now at the forefront of global efforts to tackle critical sustainability and environmental challenges facing our planet.
A year later, in 2025, Omar Yaghi was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry together with Susumu Kitagawa and Richard Robson, for pioneering the development of metal-organic frameworks (MOFs).
Omar M. Yaghi is Distinguished Chair Professor at Tsinghua University (CN). He is widely known for the discovery and for pioneering the development of several extensive classes of new materials: Metal-Organic Frameworks (MOFs), Covalent Organic Frameworks (COFs), and Zeolitic Imidazolate Frameworks (ZIFs). These materials have the highest surface areas known to date, making them useful in many applications, such as the storage and separation of hydrogen, methane, and carbon dioxide or the capture of water from air for fresh water production. The building block approach he developed has led to an exponential growth in the creation of new materials having a diversity and multiplicity previously unknown in chemistry. He termed this field “Reticular Chemistry” and defines it as “stitching molecular building blocks into extended structures by strong bonds.” Yaghi has successfully taken the field of reticular chemistry all the way from discovery to applications, and changed the way scientists think about making and using new materials.
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