This year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry is about metal-organic frameworks, a new class of materials that opens doors to everything from carbon dioxide capture to extracting drinking water from desert air. At Chalmers, several researchers have leading expertise in the field. Professor Lars Öhrström has close connections to two of the laureates and is pleased that the area he has studied for 30 years is now receiving even more well-deserved attention.
The 2025 Nobel Prize in Chemistry has been awarded to Susumu Kitagawa, Richard Robson, and Omar M. Yaghi for the development of metal–organic frameworks (MOFs). For Lars Öhrström, Professor inorganic chemistry at the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering at Chalmers University of Technology, the news was very joyful.
“This is fantastic news and incredibly well deserved! We’ve been hoping for many years that the Nobel Committee would recognize this field,” he says.
Lars Öhrström has been researching in this area since he began working at Chalmers in 1995. Together with Dr. Françoise Noa, he wrote the first textbook on this new class of materials. He describes metal–organic frameworks as one of the most promising areas for developing sustainable technological solutions that the world needs.
“They have potential in a wide range of applications involving the selective capture of molecules. Water purification and the ability to extract water from desert air are two examples that could play a crucial role in addressing the growing global risk of water scarcity,” he explains.
Metal–organic frameworks (MOFs) are a new class of materials with exceptional properties. These porous, often crystalline materials are constructed from metal ions or metal clusters linked by organic molecules into three-dimensional networks. In this way, they act as “molecular sponges” with enormous surface areas and large cavities that can be used to capture, store, separate, and transport various substances.
This opens up a wide range of applications, such as biogas storage, carbon dioxide capture, catalysis, and extracting water from air.
Several of the researchers at Chalmers who study metal-organic frameworks have, over the years, had contact with one or more of this year’s Nobel Prize laureates in Chemistry. Lars Öhrström has collaborated with Susumu Kitagawa within the framework of the global chemistry standards organization IUPAC, and in 2018 co-authored a scientific article together with Omar M. Yaghi. Öhrström is also involved in the research institute led by Yaghi, the Berkeley Global Science Institute, and two years ago he co-organized a Nobel symposium in Karlskoga, where both Omar Yaghi and Susumu Kitagawa participated.
“Omar M. Yaghi has also visited Chalmers twice. On those occasions, some of our master’s students had the pleasure of meeting and listening to him, which was wonderful,” he says.
News article about Lars Öhrström´s research
K Networks with smart holes can solve big issues
Extracting drinking water from the air in a desert might sound like science fiction, but in fact it can be possible sooner than we think. The solution can be found in a new material class with exceptional properties - Metal-organic frameworks (MOF), that more and more people are talking about. At Chalmers University of Technology, there are researchers with leading expertise in the field.