Omar Yaghi was changing flights when he received the news that he had been awarded the 2025 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

Arab chemist Yaghi, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, shared the honor with Susumu Kitagawa of Kyoto University and Richard Robson of the University of Melbourne for the development of metal-organic frameworks.

Born to Palestinian refugees in Jordan, Yaghi grew up in a crowded household and has now become the first Palestinian scientist to win a Nobel Prize.

He is also the first Nobel Laureate to be born in Jordan.

Speaking to NobelPrize.org after hearing the news, Yaghi said he was astonished, delighted, and overwhelmed by the honor.

“My parents could barely read or write. It’s been quite a journey, science allows you to do it,” he said. “My father finished sixth grade, my mother could not read and write. Science is the greatest equalising force in the world.”

Yaghi was granted Saudi citizenship in 2021 and is widely known as the father of the field of metal-organic frameworks.

He recalled that his fascination began early, inspired by the “beauty of molecules.”

At the age of 15, he left for the United States on his father’s advice to pursue his studies.

He earned his PhD in Chemistry from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and later became an NSF Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard University.

Reflecting on his scientific journey, Yaghi shared that his initial dream was to publish a paper that would receive 100 citations.

“Now my students say our group has garnered over 250,000 citations. It was totally unexpected,” he said.

In 2015, Yaghi received the King Faisal International Prize for Science for his seminal contributions to molecular architecture.

Remembering his modest beginnings, he said, “I grew up in a very humble home and we were a dozen of us in one small room, sharing it with the cattle that we used to raise.”

“It’s been quite a journey,” he said, summing up a life that began in hardship and culminated in one of science’s highest honors.