Omar Yaghi leaves UC Berkeley to lead AI materials institute

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Omar Yaghi, a Nobel Prize–winning chemist who shared last year's chemistry Nobel, has left his faculty post at the University of California, Berkeley to take a full-time appointment at Tsinghua University in Beijing, where he will head a new artificial intelligence institute for materials research. The institute aims to design and synthesize new materials and to overcome the efficiency bottlenecks of trial-and-error discovery, potentially speeding development of applications such as water harvesters and other commercial uses of metal-organic frameworks. The move highlights growing Chinese investment in science and may influence global talent flows and research competition with the United States.

Yaghi will head Tsinghua's AI institute for materials discovery.