A Long ‘Journey’ for Nobel Chemistry Winner Born to Palestinian Refugees

The Washington Post

16:24 JST, October 9, 2025

U.S. chemist Omar Yaghi, who on Wednesday became the first Palestinian scientist to win a Nobel Prize, reached the pinnacle of his profession after “quite a journey,” he said in remarks posted to X from the official Nobel account, recorded just after he learned the news.

He was born into a family of refugees, he told the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which awarded him the Nobel Prize in chemistry for groundbreaking work in molecular architecture, along with collaborators Susumu Kitagawa and Richard Robson. “My parents could barely read or write,” he said.

Yaghi grew up in Amman, Jordan, where his parents moved after fleeing Gaza in 1948, when hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were forced from their homes amid the war of 1948 that led to the creation of the Jewish state. “We were a dozen of us in one small room, sharing it with the cattle that we used to raise,” he said.

Yaghi first saw a “stick and ball” diagram of molecules at a public library in Amman, Jordan’s capital, when he was 10. He said he was immediately drawn to them and only later “learned that these were molecules that make up our world.”

At age 15, Yaghi moved to Troy, New York. He studied English at a community college before transferring to the University at Albany in 1983.

“I was in love with chemistry from the very beginning,” Yaghi told a colleague from the University of California at Berkeley, where he now works. “And when I moved to Albany, I immediately got into research.” Over more than 30 years, Yaghi and his colleagues engineered new methods of combining metals with organic molecules to build hybrid compounds.

The chair of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry heralded the potential of these compounds in Wednesday’s award announcement, saying they could bring “previously unforeseen opportunities” to the field. The porous molecular structures on which Yaghi and the two other chemistry Nobel awardees worked have potential applications connected to global challenges including water pollution and greenhouse gas emissions.

Arab leaders touted Yaghi’s win as a regional success.

Jordan’s King Abdullah II called the chemist’s achievement “Jordan’s pride,” in a statement posted to X, and said that his win proved that Jordanians could “make a difference wherever they are.”

“The Arab world is full of geniuses” and “rich in minds,” Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum, vice president and prime minister of the United Arab Emirates, posted to X. “Our message is to restore confidence in ourselves, confidence in our youth, and confidence in our scientists.”

Representatives from Saudi Arabia and the Palestinian mission to the United Nations also claimed Yaghi as one of their own. Saudi Arabia called Yaghi the “first Saudi to receive the award,” although The Washington Post could not immediately verify whether Yaghi held Saudi citizenship. The Palestinian mission to the U.N. reposted the Nobel committee’s award announcement with the caption, “Palestine refugees can also win Nobel Prizes.”

Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat shared the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize with Israel’s then-prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, and then-foreign minister, Shimon Peres, for their efforts on a joint peace process outlined in the Oslo accords.

Yaghi told the Nobel Prize committee that he had not seen himself as someone trying to change the world with chemistry.

“When I set out, I didn’t set out to solve the world’s carbon problem or water problem,” Yaghi said. “I set out to build beautiful things and solve an intellectual problem.”