My dream is for everyone to have water independence — where your water is yours, independent of everything else.” — Dr. Omar M. Yaghi
Water scarcity is one of the defining humanitarian crises of our time. On the next Fiat Lux Redux, Tuesday, June 23 at 9 AM, newly minted Nobel laureate Dr. Omar Yaghi presents a lecture on Turning Air into Water For All.
Born into a refugee community in Amman, Jordan, Yaghi grew up in a household without electricity or running water, where the arrival of a neighborhood water truck was a critical lifeline. His childhood, defined by scarcity, inspired his dream of global “water independence.” Moving to the United States at age 15, his pursuit of science led to a PhD from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, faculty appointments at Michigan and UCLA, and ultimately his current home at UC Berkeley where he is the founding director of the Berkeley Global Science Institute and the James and Neeltje Tretter Chair Professor of Chemistry. He won the prestigious 2024 Tang Prize in Sustainable Development for groundbreaking work in innovative materials for carbon capture, energy storage, and water harvesting and was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in October 2025 (sharing it with Susumu Kitagawa and Richard Robson) for his pioneering work on atmospheric water harvesting using metal-organic frameworks (MOFs).
Speaking to students as part of the LNS 110: Brilliance of Berkeley course, the lecture took place on Jan. 23, 2026, and was part of a course featuring distinguished researchers working on the world’s most pressing issues. Yaghi recounts how a lifelong fascination with molecular drawings led him to pioneer the field of reticular chemistry, illustrating his journey through the productive “failures” of his early graduate school experiments that ultimately paved the way for his discovery of a revolutionary green chemistry solution capable of extracting clean drinking water directly from the air—even in the planet’s driest deserts–metal-organic frameworks (MOFs).
Conventional water harvesting requires high humidity or massive energy footprints (like desalination). Laboratory breakthroughs like Yaghi’s lead to real-world climate solutions and in the future, the hope is that artificial intelligence will streamline data analysis and free researchers to focus on creative, human-centric innovations.
Fiat Lux Redux presents previously aired lectures, conversations, and podcasts originating on the campus of UC Berkeley every other Tuesday from 9am to 9:30am. These often-lengthy original programs have been edited to a 30-minute format by experienced KALX producers. The show’s name, Latin for “Let there be light”, is a reference to the University of California’s motto, which is also Fiat Lux. The show’s goal is to provide listeners with a window into the intellectual and cultural life of UC Berkeley and to showcase the wide range of subjects and diversity of thought and ideas that are present at UC Berkeley.
This Berkeley Talks episode was originally broadcast on March 6, 2026. This program was edited by Mike Gill for KALX Berkeley. If you have questions or comments about Fiat Lux Redux, contact lisa.katovich@gmail.com.
