Name: Harnessing Science for Survival
Uploaded: 2025-10-28
Duration: 10 min 27 s

At a moment when the world faces mounting climate and water crises, Nobel laureate Omar Yaghi, brings a scientist’s vision for resilience. As the creator of groundbreaking materials that pull water from the air and capture clean energy, Yaghi is redefining what’s possible in the race to combat climate change.  The UC Berkeley chemist shares how innovation can drive a cleaner, more sustainable global economy and inspire a new generation to lead it.

Harnessing Science for Survival

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In the world's driest deserts, scientists are now drawing clean water straight from the air, thanks to breakthrough materials that can trap, store, and release molecules with remarkable precision. That discovery is pushing the bounds of what's possible in the realms of sustainability and environmental science, and it earned our next guest, the 2025 Nobel Prize in chemistry. University of California Berkeley professor Omar Yagi, the first Saudi national ever to receive a Nobel Prize, joins us now virtually to discuss how innovation and scientific curiosity can help solve humanity's greatest challenges and inspire a new generation of pioneers. Ah, Professor Yogi, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you. Congratulations. Congratulations on receiving the Nobel Prize in Chemistry and first Saudi national ever to do so. So thank you. Now, my first question for you, um, Professor Yogi is, what was the original spark that set you on the path toward developing materials that can quite literally pull water from the air? Well, we have been developing materials by assembling them molecule by molecule, almost like molecular Legos, to make different forms. And upon examining, examining the properties of a member of this series of compounds that we made, we call MOFs. Um, we discovered that in fact not only can you take up water from air but also you can release it under mild conditions. In fact, conditions with temperatures that are similar to the desert. So immediately the idea came to me that this powder of moth could be set in a desert. It would take up water from the air, let's say at night and during the day when it, when the temperature is higher. would come out and it can be condensed and you're basically making liquid water or drinking water. Wow. Now I'm curious, how do you see your innovations addressing the biggest climate and water crisis of today? And I guess my other question is, are we, are we too late? Is it, is there still time to do this? We're not too late. I think that once society decides that there is a problem, we will get to work and those problems can be solved. I mean, all these technological problems, once we decide, once we have the will to fix those problems, solutions emerge just like the solution that just received the Nobel Prize. And so Mars. are already deployed to capture carbon dioxide from flu gas of cement plants and for water harvesting, it's in 2026 at Toco is a is a startup company that I co-founded in Southern California will be commercializing units that deliver almost 4000 L a day. These are electrified devices. And they can operate for many, many years without having to replenish or replace the MOF material. Now we also have another. A device that can deliver 850 L of water a day with no energy input aside from ambient sunlight or the use of waste heat. So these are energetically very favorable conditions and and the water that is delivered is ultra clean. And has no contamination in it whatsoever. It's drinkable after it's mineralized, but also could be used for agriculture, for household use, for hygiene, and it's just water that is produced every day clean, clean water. I think these innovations sound amazing, and I'm sure a lot of people in this room are wondering how far away are we from a future in which this is actually scalable technology that can be implemented and what exactly is holding it back. There's nothing holding it back. It takes time. Uh, for example, we, we discovered. the water harvesting effect using MOPs back in 2014 and since then we have been busy scaling up materials, configuring them into devices, deploying these devices in the desert and testing them in, for example, the Arizona desert, the Death Valley desert, and now actually a team of researchers from my group is in Saudi Arabia testing them in the desert of Saudi Arabia. So It takes time to figure out exactly the conditions under which you could make devices that are most energy efficient so that the water you're producing is cheap and economical and could be scaled. So now we are at the production stage. We we are about to announce these two products that I mentioned by Atoko and, and, and that's just the beginning of deploying these in society. Um, the second aspect of this is that to speed up these developments we have been using AI and AI tools, machine learning. And as well as large language models to not just transform what we do in the lab in terms of speed and accuracy but also to address these challenges that everybody faces in going from a molecule to a material and then configuring the material in a device and then making sure that that device is operating robustly. And commercialization, this value, this entire value chain can be aided by AI, and we have begun in the last 3 years we've begun to Carry out these kinds of studies with breathtaking success. We published over 15 papers that show how useful are LLMs and machine learning algorithms in speeding the tasks that we do in the lab, as well as the discovery and going beyond that box that we have been. Uh, working and on the most chemists are working, so exploring this amazing gold mine that we have uncovered by our discovery of moths. Amazing. You've said before that science is a bridge between nations and cultures. I'm curious what you've learned about diplomacy through science in this era of very high geopolitical tensions. Over the years I've given lectures in many, many countries around the world, thousands of lectures, and often we, we focus on science and the ability of science, scientific language to cross cross borders and you know, a chemical formula in Saudi Arabia versus other parts of the world is exactly the same thing. Everybody can understand that chemical formula, so it's a unifying language. The science is a unifying language that allows people to talk. And to talk freely about something that is great to the development of their people, their country. So it is a common language, it's a powerful language to bridge our differences and to allow us to continue talking and talking about innovations, talking about how we can impact the next generation of thinkers. I think that makes a lot of sense. I, I've talked to a lot of Nobel Prize winners, and often I feel like the sentiment they give is that the Nobel Prize often symbolizes kind of a completion of a project. Yet I think your work very much like you said, feels like this is the beginning. You're still scaling, you're still moving forward. What questions are keeping you awake at night right now? What are you looking toward in the future? Well, I, I agree with you. I think the Nobel Prize was just the beginning of this field. As I said, we have opened a gold mine. We only scratch the surface. There's a lot more to be done, and I haven't told you about covalent organic frameworks or costs. These are another entirely new class of materials that we have developed using this new chemistry that we've been working on. So for example, AI, I mentioned AI. I think the use of machine learning and large language models will be transformative to chemistry and materials, not just in terms of the speed with which these materials could be made, but also for accessing compounds, moths, and coughs, and other compounds that can address very specific problems, not just in clean energy and sustainability as we have been talking, but also in biomedicine. And and in in in pharmaceuticals and other, other applications, catalysis, converting compounds from a harmful compound to a harmless compound, all these become possible because we can design materials with precision on the atomic and molecular level. So that's another, another dream of mine is that could we design materials that operate like DNA where you have sequences of. that code for very specific properties. So not only can we go from a material to a property, but also could you tell me, Omar, we want this particular property. Could we identify structures? So going back and forth between materials to properties and properties to materials and all of that is going to be enabled. And made accessible, more accessible than ever before using AI. I totally agree, and I wish you the best of luck. Thank you so much for joining us, Professor Yogi. Thank you. Thank you.