Congratulations to Paola D'Angelo and Francesco Tavani on their prestigious collaboration with Omar Yaghi, winner of the 2025 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
Professor D'Angelo's AQUAFRAME project — Advancing QUASIperiodic metal-organic FRAMEworks for atmospheric water harvesting — was funded with €420,000 as part of the MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships. This brought Dr Tavani to Professor Yaghi's group at the University of California, Berkeley, where they developed new technology based on MOFs (crystalline materials consisting of metal atoms connected to each other through organic molecules). This technology is capable of obtaining drinking water from the air. This technology could solve the global problem of water scarcity.
Capturing water from the atmosphere using sustainable materials is an innovative approach that could significantly help to combat the global water crisis. This process uses metal-organic frameworks (MOFs), which have the ability to absorb significant amounts of gaseous molecules, such as water vapour and carbon dioxide, present in the atmosphere under real conditions thanks to their unprecedented porosity and high chemical adaptability.
The AQUAFRAME project aims to develop technological solutions using 'quasi-periodic MOFs' to address the issues of high energy consumption and low water productivity in non-temperate climates. This ambitious and important project focuses on experiments conducted at synchrotron facilities and artificial intelligence methods. Thanks to particle accelerators capable of generating extremely high-intensity X-rays, it will be possible to acquire molecular-level information on how disorder affects the water absorption of MOFs. This will lay the foundations for designing next-generation water harvesting systems that will exceed current performance records.gettazione di sistemi di raccolta dell'acqua di nuova generazione che superino gli attuali record di prestazioni.
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On 8 October 2025, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced that the 2025 Nobel Prize in Chemistry would be awarded to Susumu Kitagawa of Kyoto University in Japan, Richard Robson of the University of Melbourne in Australia, and Omar M. Yaghi of the University of California, Berkeley in the USA.
The prize was awarded in recognition of their work on metal–organic frameworks.
The 2025 Nobel Prize laureates in Chemistry have created molecular constructions with large spaces through which gases and other chemicals can flow. These constructions, known as metal–organic frameworks, have a variety of applications, including harvesting water from desert air, capturing carbon dioxide, storing toxic gases and catalysing chemical reactions.
“Metal–organic frameworks have enormous potential, bringing previously unforeseen opportunities for custom-made materials with new functions,” says Heiner Linke, Chair of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry.
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Omar M. Yaghi is 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. He is also the Co-Director of the Kavli Energy NanoSciences Institute (Kavli ENSI) focusing on the basic science of energy transformation on the molecular level, the California Research Alliance by BASF (CARA) supporting joint academia-industry innovations, as well as the Bakar Institute of Digital Materials for the Planet (BIDMaP) which aims to develop cost-efficient, easily deployable versions of two classes of ultra porous materials – known as metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) and covalent organic frameworks (COFs) – to help limit and address the impacts of climate change.
Omar Yaghi, togheter Susumu Kitagawa and Richard Robson, awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2025.
Paola D'Angelo is a full professor of physical chemistry at Sapienza University and a senior fellow of the School of Advanced Studies (SSAS). She is also the president of the Italian Synchrotron Light Society (SILS).
Francesco Tavani attended the Science and Technology programme at SSAS from 2014 to 2019. He obtained a PhD in Chemical Sciences from Sapienza in 2023 under Prof. D'Angelo's supervision, and is currently conducting research as a research fellow at the same university under Prof. D'Angelo's and Prof. Omar Yaghi's joint supervision at the University of California, Berkeley research centre.