Omar Yaghi’s Balzan Lecture Draws SRF and NZZ Coverage
Recording Now Available

Omar Yaghi’s Balzan Lecture at ETH Zurich has sparked coverage from both SRF and the NZZ. The recording of the lecture itself is now available online.

On September 16, 2026, Yaghi delivered the lecture “Chemistry in the Age of Abundance” to an audience of more than 400 people in ETH Zurich’s Audi Max. The lecture was co-hosted by the Collegium and the International Balzan Foundation. In it, he explored how chemists today can create molecules and materials with a diversity and abundance never before possible—particularly in reticular chemistry, the field he pioneered, which has already produced hundreds of thousands of metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) and covalent organic frameworks (COFs). He also discussed how AI and robotics are accelerating this shift from scarcity to abundance, and how these same technologies are being deployed to tackle two of the planet’s most pressing challenges: carbon capture and water scarcity.

Few scientists offer both a story and a body of work this compelling, so it’s no surprise the lecture attracted the media’s interest. Barbara Bleisch spoke with him for SRF’s Sternstunde Philosophie about his journey from a childhood as a Palestinian refugee to winning the 2025 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

NZZ journalist Leonid Leiva Ariosa, meanwhile, asked him about his recent move from UC Berkeley to Tsinghua University in Beijing, among other topics. The Nobel Prize, in Yaghi’s view, is not the summit of his career. His ambition is undiminished, and the move to China marks the start of a new chapter to think even bigger.

For those who couldn’t attend Omar Yaghi's lecture, the recording is now available: