UIUC graduate among winners of Nobel Prize in chemistry

STOCKHOLM -- A University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign graduate is among the winners of the 2025 Nobel Prize in chemistry.

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Susumu Kitagawa, Richard Robson and Omar M. Yaghi share the Nobel Prize in chemistry for their work in the development of metal-organic frameworks.

Yaghi began his graduate studies at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He received his PhD in 1990 under the guidance of Professor Walter G. Klemperer.

He is now with the University of California, Berkeley.

A west suburban man was among the three winners of the 2025 Nobel Prize in medicine for work on peripheral immune tolerance.

READ ALSO | Elmhurst native Frederick Ramsdell wins 2025 Nobel Prize in medicine

Hans Ellegren, secretary-general of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, announced the chemistry prize in Stockholm on Wednesday. It was the third prize announced this week.

Robson is affiliated with the University of Melbourne in Australia and Kitagawa with Japan's Kyoto University.

There have been 116 chemistry prizes given to 195 individuals between 1901 and 2024.

The 2024 prize was awarded to David Baker, a biochemist at the University of Washington in Seattle, and to Demis Hassabis and John Jumper, computer scientists at Google DeepMind, a British-American artificial intelligence research laboratory based in London.

The three were awarded for discovering powerful techniques to decode and even design novel proteins, the building blocks of life. Their work used advanced technologies, including artificial intelligence, and holds the potential to transform how new drugs and other materials are made.

The first Nobel of 2025 was announced Monday. The prize in medicine went to Mary E. Brunkow, Fred Ramsdell and Dr. Shimon Sakaguchi for their discoveries concerning peripheral immune tolerance.

Tuesday's physics prize went to John Clarke, Michel H. Devoret and John M. Martinis for their research on the weird world of subatomic quantum tunneling that advances the power of everyday digital communications and computing.

This year's Nobel announcements continue with the literature prize Thursday. The Nobel Peace Prize will be announced Friday and the economics prize next Monday.

The award ceremony will be held Dec. 10, the anniversary of the death of Alfred Nobel, who founded the prizes. Nobel was a wealthy Swedish industrialist and the inventor of dynamite. He died in 1896.

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Dazio reported from Berlin.