Report Title：A New AI Discipline Leading to Clean Environment and Sustainability

Reporter：Omar M. Yaghi

Time and Venue：15:00-16:30, NOV 19, 2025，Hall 100, New Environmental Building

Shanghai Jiao Tong University

Speaker Introduction：

       He received his Ph.D. in Chemistry from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and was an NSF Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard University. He is a University Professor and the James and Neeltje Tretter Professor of Chemistry at University of California, Berkeley. He is the Founding Director of the Berkeley Global Science Institute whose mission is to build centers of research in developing countries and provide opportunities for young scholars to discover and learn. He is also the Co-Director of the Kavli Energy NanoSciences Institute, the California Research Alliance by BASF (CARA), as well as the Bakar Institute of Digital Materials for the Planet, to help limit and address the impacts of climate change.

       He is widely known for pioneering several extensive classes of new materials: Metal-Organic Frameworks (MOFs), Covalent Organic Frameworks (COFs), Zeolitic Imidazolate Frameworks (ZIFs), and Molecular Weaving. These materials have the highest surface areas known to date, making them useful for hydrogen and methane storage, carbon capture and conversion, water harvesting from desert air, and catalysis, to mention a few. He termed this field 'Reticular Chemistry' and defines it as 'stitching molecular building blocks into extended structures by strong bonds'. His work on MOFs, COFs, and ZIFs led to over 300 published articles, which have received a total of more than 275,000 citations and an h-index of 197.

Abstract：

       Given the vast possible chemical structures and materials resulting from reticular chemistry (MOFs and COFs) and the flexibility with which they can be designed and produced, it is timely to deploy large language models and machine learning for rapidly connecting the molecule to the material to societal applications, ranging from clean air, clean water to catalysis and biomedicine. AIMATRY is a new field of science where AI is used for the design of new materials and critically for connecting a desired property to a specific chemical structure. AIMATRY’s goals are to lay the foundations for productive use of AI in discovery and study of new materials, and to ultimately produce materials faster, better, cheaper and greener than has ever been possible. I also will share how multivariate MOFs and COFs constitute ideal objects for AIMATRY