Professor
Omar M. Yaghi
Pioneering Water Harvesting Technology
From Research to Innovation
A Personal Journey
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It guided his research focus towards addressing global water challenges.
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Led to the design of innovative water capture sorbents.
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Ultimately inspired the co-founding of Water Harvesting, now known as WaHa, in 2018.
WaHa’s Original Mission Statement & Evolution
A Dual Approach: Business and Humanitarian Efforts
WaHa’s strategy can be summarized by a twist on Benjamin Franklin’s famous quote: “We will do well, so we can do good.” This approach allows the company to:
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Develop machines with strong business cases.
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Later deploy these technologies for humanitarian purposes globally.
By balancing commercial viability with social responsibility, WaHa aims to make a lasting impact on global water scarcity while building a sustainable business model.
For a further background on Professor Yaghi’s professional accomplishments, he received his Ph.D. in Chemistry from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and was an NSF Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard University. He is currently the James and Neeltje Tretter Chair Professor of Chemistry at University of California, Berkeley. He is the Founding Director of the Berkeley Global Science Institute whose mission is to build centers of research in developing countries and provide opportunities for young scholars to discover and learn, and the Co-Director of the Kavli Energy NanoSciences Institute focusing on the basic science of energy transformation on the molecular level, as well as the California Research Alliance by BASF supporting joint academia-industry innovations.
His work encompasses the synthesis, structure and properties of inorganic and organic compounds and the design and construction of new crystalline materials. He is widely known for pioneering 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 for hydrogen and methane storage, carbon capture and conversion, water harvesting from desert air, and catalysis, to mention a few. 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’. His work on MOFs, COFs, and ZIFs led to over 300 published articles, which have received a total of more than 200,000 citations. He has an h-index of 171 and ranked as the second most impactful chemist worldwide (Top 100 Chemists, Thomson Reuters, 2011).
Yaghi is an elected member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (2019), American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2022), and the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina (2022). He has also been honored with many awards, including the Sacconi Medal of the Italian Chemical Society (2004), Materials Research Society Medal (2007), American Chemical Society Award in the Chemistry of Materials (2009), Royal Society of Chemistry Centenary Prize (2010), King Faisal International Prize in Science (2015), 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), August-Wilhelm-von-Hofmann-Denkmünze of the German Chemical Society (2020), Royal Society of Chemistry Sustainable Water Award (2020), Belgium’s International Solvay Chair in Chemistry (2021), and VinFuture Prize for Emerging Science and Technology (2021).