Last year's Nobel-Winning U.S. Chemist Will Move to China to Lead A.I. Institute

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/09/science/nobel-winning-us-chemist-will-move-to-china-to-lead-ai-institute.html?unlocked_article_code=1.wlA.fbW2.24QApPB-EoJN&smid=url-share

Omar Yaghi, an immigrant to the United States who shared last year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry, has left his faculty post at the University of California, Berkeley, for one in China, where he will lead an institute using artificial intelligence to accelerate the discovery of new materials.

Dr. Yaghi’s move comes amid the Trump administration’s continuing disruptions of U.S. science funding and China’s efforts to woo international scientists with hefty budgets.

Last week, Tsinghua University in Beijing welcomed Dr. Yaghi in an appointment ceremony, calling him one of the world’s foremost chemists. The university said he saw his new post as an opportunity “not to slow down, not to repeat what has already been done, but to do science with more energy, more intensity, and more ambition than ever before.”

“China is increasing its investment in science overall, including chemistry,” said Alessandra Zimmermann, a budget analyst at the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a scientific group based in Washington, D.C. The best measures of scientific accomplishment, she added, show that China “has been outperforming the U.S. in top chemistry papers.”