The 2025 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was announced to be awarded in part to Susumu Kitagawa, distinguished professor at the Kyoto University Institute for Advanced Study (KUIAS).
Research Overview
Kitagawa’s main research field is inorganic and material chemistry, in particular, chemistry of coordination space, and his current research interests are centered on synthesis and properties of porous coordination polymers/metal-organic frameworks.
He was the first to discover and to demonstrate “porosity” for metal complexes with gas sorption experiments (1997), whose materials are called porous coordination polymers (PCPs) or metal-organic frameworks (MOFs). To date, MOFs are classified as a new category of porous materials, as opposed to the conventional classifications of inorganic and carbon materials. Kitagawa pioneered the functional chemistry of MOFs, and discovered flexible MOFs, dissimilar to those of conventional porous materials. Today several hundred different MOFs are known, and over 7,000 articles on this class of materials have been published annually worldwide. The research developments built on his discoveries are anticipated to lead to radical innovations in materials science, with wide-ranging implications for both academia and industry. Chemical industry firms are producing MOF materials for use in purification, storage, and transportation of gases, among other applications. Kitagawa’s achievement has blazed a trail to a new era for porous materials, vital to addressing energy and environmental issues and contributing to human welfare.