"He was born into a family of refugees, he told the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which awarded him the Nobel Prize in chemistry for groundbreaking work in molecular architecture, along with collaborators Susumu Kitagawa and Richard Robson. "My parents could barely read or write." Yaghi grew up in Amman, Jordan, where his parents moved after fleeing Gaza in 1948, when hundreds of thousands of Palestinians took flight or were forced from their homes amid sectarian fighting in what would soon become Israel."
"Yaghi first saw a "stick and ball" diagram of molecules at a public library in Amman, Jordan's capital, when he was 10. He said he was immediately drawn to them and only later "learned that these were molecules that make up our world." At age 15, Yaghi moved to Troy, New York. He studied English at a community college before transferring to the University at Albany in 1983."
Omar Yaghi was born to refugee parents who fled Gaza in 1948 and grew up in Amman, Jordan in crowded quarters where the family raised cattle. He first encountered a "stick and ball" molecular diagram at age 10 and later understood that such diagrams represented the molecules that make up the world. He moved to Troy, New York at 15, learned English, and transferred to the University at Albany in 1983. Over more than 30 years, he developed methods to combine metals with organic molecules to build porous hybrid compounds. Those porous metal-organic frameworks promise previously unforeseen scientific and technological opportunities.
Read at The Washington Post
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]