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MRS Medal

Talk Presentation:   Metal-Organic Frameworks for Clean Energy
We invite you to view a report on this presentation from The Meeting Scene.

The MRS Medal is awarded for a specific outstanding recent discovery or advancement which has a major impact on the progress of a materials-related field.

2007 MRS Medal Award Recipient

Omar M. Yaghi (view biography) University of California-Los Angeles For his pioneering work on the synthesis, structure, and theory of metal organic frameworks (View talk presentation abstract)

Omar M. Yaghi Biography
Yaghi Laboratory Web Site

Omar M. Yaghi was born in Amman, Jordan (1965). He received his B.S. in chemistry from the State University of New York-Albany (1985) and his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois-Urbana (1990) with Professor Walter G. Klemperer. From 1990-92, he was an NSF Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard University with Professor Richard H. Holm. He joined the faculty at Arizona State University in 1992 and was awarded the ACS-Exxon Solid-State Chemistry Award in 1998. In June 1999, he moved to the University of Michigan as a Professor of Chemistry and was awarded the Robert W. Parry Collegiate Chair by the Chemistry Department at UM, and the Sacconi Medal by the Inorganic Division of the Italian Chemical Society. Since January 2006 he has been the Christopher S. Foote Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry at UCLA and the Director of the Center for Reticular Chemistry at the California NanoSystems Institute, UCLA. Popular Science magazine listed him as one of the ‘Brilliant 10’ in science and engineering. Recently he was awarded the Department of Energy Research and Development Award for outstanding achievements in hydrogen storage research. He has published over 100 articles and is among the top 25 most highly cited chemists with over 100 citations per paper.

His research is focused on using the molecular building block approach for the design and synthesis of new materials. The results of his research have firmly established the building block concept for synthesis of new hybrid organic-inorganic crystals by design. The synthesis of chemical compounds by design has a long history in the field of organic chemistry. However, until recently it was not possible to apply this approach to other compounds, such as extended chemical structures especially those composed of building units that are linked together by strong bonds. In a series of seminal papers published during the past twelve years, Yaghi has established design rules and a synthetic approach which are now used worldwide by chemists, materials scientists and engineers wishing to design and prepare extended structures for a wide variety of applications.

Yaghi’s major conceptual advance was to show that cationic metal-oxygen units can be linked by anionic dicarboxylates into extended solids. He showed that these structures possess exceptional thermal stability, high porosity and are amenable to functionalization. Furthermore, he demonstrated reversible adsorption isotherms, and in 1998-1999 he reported the discovery of the iconic material known as MOF-5. A new class of robust materials, with designed pore functionality and metrics, is now being applied to essential chemical processes such as gas storage, separation, sensors and catalysis. In particular he has developed this chemistry from its basic science to important applications involving on-board energy storage of methane and hydrogen. More recently, he has shown that MOFs are also useful in capturing voluminous amounts of carbon dioxide.

Today over 1000 MOFs are being reported per year and the number of groups joining this area is continually increasing with an estimated 100 groups in academia and industry worldwide investigating MOFs. Yaghi refers to this new chemistry as ‘reticular chemistry’ which he defines as the chemistry concerned with linking molecular building blocks into predetermined extended structures using strong bonds. The results of reticular chemistry have broken several records including the least dense crystals known and MOF crystals of the highest surface areas.

Talk Presentation Abstract

Reticular chemistry concerns the linking of molecular building blocks into predetermined structures using strong bonds. We have been working on developing the conceptual and practical basis of this new area of research. As a result, new classes of crystalline porous materials have been designed and synthesized: metal-organic frameworks, zeolitic imidazolate frameworks, and covalent organic frameworks. Crystals of this type have exceptional surface areas (2,000-6,000 m2/g) and take up voluminous amounts of hydrogen (7.5 wt% at 77 K and 30-40 bar), methane (50% at 298K and 25 bar), and carbon dioxide (140 wt% at 298 K and 30 bar). The presentation focused on the design concepts, synthesis and structure of these materials, with emphasis on their applications to on-board energy storage.