Nobel Chemist Omar Yaghi Leaves Berkeley to Lead Tsinghua AI Lab
TL;DR
- Nature's on-record Yaghi interview cites Trump grant cuts and US researchers' failure to adopt AI as explicit push factors for leaving Berkeley.
- Tsinghua's institute, named AIMATRY, targets AI-driven molecular prediction with a stated goal of cutting materials R&D cycles by an order of magnitude.
- Roughly half of Yaghi's approximately 200 supervised researchers are Chinese nationals, giving Tsinghua an embedded talent pipeline alongside the appointment itself.
A newly-minted Nobel laureate leaving Berkeley for Beijing is unusual on its own. The reason he gave is what makes it worth reading.
Omar Yaghi, who shared the 2025 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Richard Robson and Susumu Kitagawa for metal-organic frameworks, has joined Tsinghua University to lead a new AI for Chemistry and Materials Science Research Center. The announcement landed on July 4, according to reporting from the South China Morning Post. Yaghi, 61, was previously the James and Neeltje Tretter professor of chemistry at UC Berkeley.
The stated research angle is a familiar AI-for-science pitch: use models to shorten materials design and synthesis cycles "by orders of magnitude," pointed at water scarcity, carbon neutrality, and sustainable development, the real-world jobs MOFs already do at lab scale (capturing carbon, harvesting water from desert air, absorbing hydrogen for clean energy). What is less familiar is the framing Yaghi gave alongside the move. In a Nature interview, he described the current state of US science as "not so encouraging because of the cutting back on grants," and said US researchers were not embracing what he sees as an "AI revolution," arguing engagement with AI models is "a matter of survival of the advanced research system in the US."
Why this matters beyond one appointment: a fresh laureate has publicly attached a talent move to US funding conditions and an AI-adoption gap, at a moment when Beijing is loudly recruiting. Yaghi trained approximately 200 researchers during his UC Berkeley tenure, nearly half of whom were Chinese, which gives the new Tsinghua center an alumni network to draw from immediately.
The honest caveat is that "orders of magnitude" is a hope, not a delivered result, and the reporting does not give you the terms of his appointment: full-time versus dual affiliation, funding scale, compute, what happens to his Berkeley group. Take those specifics as reported, not settled. The direction worth watching is whether more senior US-based principal investigators follow the same route, and whether this center starts producing real MOF designs against water and carbon in a timeframe short enough to matter.
What others are reporting
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Nature Read →
On-record Yaghi interview naming Trump grant cuts and US AI adoption lag as push factors; identifies the institute as AIMATRY; documents China's talent-recruitment financial incentives.
American researchers are not sufficiently engaging with AI technology, which he views as essential for 'survival of the advanced research system in the US'.
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VnExpress International Read →
Firsthand testimony from Yaghi mentee Zhou Zihui; documents the 7-country Yaghi Science Initiative nonprofit network; confirms roughly half of his ~200 mentees are Chinese nationals.
When doing research, he told us not to just think about the science itself or publishing papers, but also how to make our work known to the world.
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Rare Earth Exchanges Read →
Frames the departure through a critical minerals supply-chain lens, linking Yaghi's MOF work to rare earth processing, permanent magnets, and battery materials at geopolitical stake.
AI-driven materials discovery could accelerate breakthroughs in permanent magnets, rare earth processing, battery materials.
Originally reported by scmp.com
Read the original article →Original headline: Nobel Chemistry Laureate Omar Yaghi Leaves UC Berkeley to Lead Tsinghua's New AI for Chemistry and Materials Science Center