TV Venkateswaran, Dhrubajyoti Chattopadhyay and Biju Dharmapalan

“This year’s award is a story full of holes, but with enormous capacity to absorb all your attention,” said Olof Ramström, member of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry, and a spontaneous ripple of laughter wafted amongst the journalists attending the press conference for the 2025 Nobel Prize in Chemistry held at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm, Sweden, on 8 October 2025. “Small on the outside,” he added, “but very, very large on the inside” in a bit to explain the chemistry behind the Metal Organic frameworks (MOFs).

Susumu Kitagawa of Kyoto University in Japan, Richard Robson of the University of Melbourne in Australia, and Omar Yaghi of the University of California, Berkeley, will share a prize of 11 million Swedish kronor (US$1.2 million) for inventing metal-organic frameworks, which, due to their huge internal surface area, can store gases and act as catalysts, among many other potential applications, including drug delivery.

“This year’s laureates … have found ways to create materials, entirely novel materials, with large cavities on their insides,” said Nobel committee chair Heiner Linke, a nanophysicist at Lund University in Sweden, at the press conference. “A small amount of such material can almost be like Hermione’s handbag in Harry Potter — it can store huge amounts of gas in a tiny volume.” …read more on NOPR