Australian scientists celebrate Richard Robson's Nobel Prize for groundbreaking materials chemistry

MELBOURNE, Oct. 9 (Xinhua) -- Scientists in Australia have hailed University of Melbourne (UniMelb) chemist Richard Robson's Nobel Prize win as a landmark recognition for fundamental research that laid the foundation for modern materials chemistry.

The 88-year-old Australian chemist shared the 2025 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Japan's Susumu Kitagawa and American-Jordanian Omar Yaghi for pioneering the development of metal-organic frameworks (MOFs), a class of porous crystalline materials with real-world applications from greenhouse gas capture and catalysis to drug delivery and medical imaging.

Robson has been a lecturer and researcher at UniMelb since 1966. He produced the first MOFs in the early 1990s and has continued to explore different forms of MOFs ever since, a UniMelb statement said on Thursday.

"Some people thought it was a whole load of rubbish" when he started developing the concept while building models for teaching in the 1970s, Robson recalled after finding out he had won the Nobel Prize.

Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese told federal parliament, "The nature of Professor Robson's work is molecular, but the scale of its significance is absolutely enormous."

Professor Stuart Batten from the School of Chemistry at Australia's Monash University said this field of MOFs was invented by Robson in the late 1980s, "with his seminal paper outlining and demonstrating the concepts we still use today published in 1989."

This work was later built upon by Kitagawa and Yaghi to create a new type of chemistry that now sees thousands of publications a year and has applications from capturing carbon dioxide and water out of the atmosphere to new types of catalysts for cleaner chemical synthesis, Batten said.

"These new types of materials, which often function like molecular sponges or molecular sieves, are cleverly yet simply designed to consist of metal ions connected by organic molecules which assemble themselves together under the right conditions into scaffolding-like infinite frameworks," he said.

Monash University materials scientist Matthew Hill said, "By changing the combination of ingredients, hundreds of thousands of different MOFs can be made, and tailored to applications such as separating carbon dioxide from the air, harvesting water, or protecting people from harmful gases."

Robson's pioneering discoveries had inspired a generation of Australian researchers, Hill said. Enditem