Nobel laureate Omar Yaghi leaves UC Berkeley to lead an AI-driven materials institute at Tsinghua University

诺贝尔奖得主、美国化学家亚吉移居中国，入职清华大学

Omar Yaghi, 2025 Nobel laureate in chemistry, resigned from UC Berkeley and joined Tsinghua University full-time. He will lead a new AI science institute focused on accelerating the design and synthesis of new materials. Tsinghua says the goal is to break the efficiency bottleneck of traditional trial-and-error R&D. Yaghi won the Nobel for metal-organic frameworks (MOFs), porous structures that can harvest drinking water from desert air. The article frames the move against Trump-era cuts to US science funding and China's aggressive recruitment of top scientists, noting that China already outperforms the US in top chemistry papers.

Why it matters: A Nobel laureate moving to Tsinghua to lead an AI materials institute is a significant event. The score stays at 78 because the AI angle is still directional — no model, compute, or team specifics yet.