Strange to see American political-ish news in Nature of all places (a British scientific journal, after all) but here we are. One of the world’s top chemists, Omar Yaghi, is leaving the U.S. to lead an AI-assisted materials lab in China:
Yaghi was unavailable to speak to Nature for this story. However, in an interview with Scientific American last month, he said that the current state of US science is “not so encouraging because of the cutting back on grants” as well as the drop in support from US science agencies. He also voiced concerns that US researchers were not embracing what he sees as an “artificial-intelligence revolution”. Researchers need to engage with AI models, he said, “as a matter of survival of the advanced research system in the US”.
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Born in Amman, Jordan, to Palestinian refugees, Yaghi moved to the United States at the age of 15 and lived there until he moved to China earlier this year. He is best known for developing metal–organic framework (MOF) compounds — highly porous materials with vast internal surface areas that make them capable of storing gases and serving as catalysts for chemical reactions, among other functions. Chemists have created more than 100,000 types of MOF, with an eye towards putting them to use in a range of commercial applications, including harvesting water from the air and delivering drugs into the body.
Yaghi — who became a faculty member at the University of California (UC), Berkeley in 2012 — has earned a slew of awards for his contributions to materials science, including the Albert Einstein World Award of Science and a share of both the Wolf Prize in Chemistry and, last year, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. He has also founded or co-founded several US companies, including Atoco in Irvine, California, which is developing materials that can be used for water-vapour harvesting and carbon capture, and WaHa in Fremont, California, which has created a device that turns “humidity into pure water while cutting energy costs for climate control”, according to the company’s website.