Lectures and conversations

Mohamed Eddaoudi is Ibn Alhaytham Distinguished Professor of Chemistry and Chair of the Advanced Membranes and Porous Materials Platform at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST). His research in reticular chemistry concerns the design of metal–organic frameworks (MOFs) and related porous solids, and their use as sorbents and membranes for energy-efficient gas separations, carbon capture and gas storage. He studied chemistry at Ibnou Zohr University in Agadir and received his master’s degree and doctorate from Denis Diderot University (Paris VII). After postdoctoral work with Omar Yaghi at Arizona State University and the University of Michigan, he joined the University of South Florida in 2002 and moved to KAUST in 2009. He is an elected Fellow of The World Academy of Sciences and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry, a Clarivate Highly Cited Researcher, and an Associate Editor of Chemical Science and of IUCrJ.

Mohamed Eddaoudi is Ibn Alhaytham Distinguished Professor of Chemistry and Chair of the Advanced Membranes and Porous Materials Platform at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), Saudi Arabia.

His research is in reticular chemistry: the design of ordered materials by linking molecular building blocks. Early work on stable porous frameworks and the isoreticular principle was carried out in Omar Yaghi’s group. Since 2002, his own groups and collaborators have developed strategies for constructing metal–organic frameworks (MOFs), metal–organic polyhedra and covalent-organic frameworks, from building-block approaches to recent methods for multicomponent structures. A second strand of work applies these materials as sorbents and membranes for energy-efficient gas separations, carbon capture and gas storage.

Eddaoudi studied chemistry in Morocco, completing a bachelor’s degree in chemistry at Ibnou Zohr University in Agadir in 1991. A Moroccan government scholarship took him to Denis Diderot University (Paris VII), where he received a master’s degree in materials analysis (1992) and a doctorate in chemistry (1996) under Anthony Coleman. He then worked with Omar Yaghi as a postdoctoral fellow at Arizona State University and as a research associate at the University of Michigan. In 2002 he began his independent career at the University of South Florida, where he became professor in 2009, the year he also joined KAUST; he held both posts until 2016.

At KAUST he chaired the Chemical Science Program (2010–2017), served as Associate Director and then Director of the Advanced Membranes and Porous Materials Center, and has chaired its successor platform since 2024. His group’s first KAUST doctoral graduate completed in 2014, and he has since supervised many doctoral and master’s students. He has chaired the International Conference on Materials and Environmental Science in Morocco since 2018.

Eddaoudi is an elected Fellow of The World Academy of Sciences (TWAS) and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry. His recognitions include the Kuwait Prize in Chemistry, the Almarai Prize, the Abdul Hameed Shoman Prize for Arab Researchers and the Union of Arab Chemists’ Personality of the Year in Chemistry, and he has been named a Clarivate Highly Cited Researcher. He is an Associate Editor of Chemical Science and of IUCrJ.