Chemist Omar Yaghi, a 2025 Nobel laureate for helping to develop new types of materials called “metal-organic frameworks,” has reportedly left the United States to become the leader of an AI research center at China’s Tsinghua University. Yaghi, 61, is the son of Palestinian refugees; his family emigrated to the United States from Jordan when he was 15 and he has lived in the U.S. ever since. He earned a Ph.D. in inorganic chemistry from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1990 and has worked as a researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, since 2012. He received several prestigious awards culminating in a Nobel Prize in 2025 which he shared with two other scientists for developing metal-organic frameworks (MOF), highly porous materials used to store gaseous materials. Yaghi founded and co-founded several companies, including a California-based company called Atoco that makes carbon and water capture systems. He has recently complained about cuts to funding for scientific research under the second Trump administration, stating in an interview with Scientific American last month that “the current state is not so encouraging because of the cutting back on grants and support of science by the very agencies that many university researchers rely on.”