Omar Yaghi pioneered a new field of chemistry (Reticular Chemistry). He has published over 300 papers in peer-reviewed scientific journals that average 500 citations per paper. He was born in Amman, Jordan and received B.S. degree in chemistry from State University of New York-Albany (1985), and Ph.D. degree in chemistry from University of Illinois-Urbana (1990). He was an NSF Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard University (1990-92). He has held professorial positions in chemistry at Arizona State University (1992-97), University of Michigan-Ann Arbor (1998-2005), and UCLA (2006-11). Since 2012, he has been the James and Neeltje Tretter Chair Professor of Chemistry at UC Berkeley.  

Omar M. Yaghi has been honored with many awards for his scientific accomplishments, including Materials Research Society Medal (2007), American Chemical Society Award in the Chemistry of Materials (2009), King Faisal International Prize in Science (2015), Royal Society of Chemistry Spiers Memorial Award (2017), Albert Einstein World Award of Science (2017), BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Basic Sciences (2017), Wolf Prize in Chemistry (2018), ENI Award for Excellence in Energy (2018), Gregori Aminoff Prize by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences (2019), Elected Member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (2019), August-Wilhelm-von-Hofmann-Denkmünze of the German Chemical Society (2020), Royal Society of Chemistry Sustainable Water Award (2020), VinFuture Prize for Emerging Science and Technology (2021), and the Wilhelm Exner Medal (2022).