Industrial Chemistry & Materials (ICM) warmly congratulates Professor Susumu Kitagawa, member of the ICM Advisory Board, on being awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2025.
This prestigious honor recognizes Prof. Kitagawa’s pioneering contributions to the development of metal–organic frameworks (MOFs) — innovations that have revolutionized materials chemistry and opened new frontiers in gas storage and separation, chemical sensors, water harvesting and purification, heterogeneous catalysis, energy storage, and drug delivery.
His recent review on flexible MOFs has been published in ICM in July 2025:
Soft porous crystals: flexible MOFs as a new class of adaptive materials
Jiahui Guo, Sai Chu, Fangli Yuan, Ken-ichi Otake,* Ming-Shui Yao* and Susumu Kitagawa*
Read for free: https://doi.org/10.1039/D5IM00067J
In this review, Prof. Kitagawa and co-authors summarized key advancements in SPCs across dosage-related applications, including moderate and high-dose scenarios as well as trace or low-dose ones. They emphasized the significance of “dose-sensitive” applications for “scaling softness” in industrialization. They reveal the promising applications of SPCs in fields such as gas storage and separation, catalysis, nuclear industry, and devices, providing valuable guidance for future material design and process development. This insightful review also provided an outlook on the remaining challenges to this field under real-world conditions.
This article has also been featured on EurekAlert!. Read the EurekAlert! coverage here.
Professor Susumu Kitagawa is a Distinguished Professor at Kyoto University, Japan. He is a Member of the Japan Academy (2019) and Foreign Member of the Royal Society (2023). His 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 is a pioneer in the development of metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) who was the first to discover and to demonstrate “porosity” for metal complexes with gas sorption experiments (1997).
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Dermot O’Hare is a Professor of Organometallic and Materials Chemistry in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Oxford. In addition, he is currently the Director of the SCG–Oxford Centre of Excellence for Chemistry and Associate Head for Business & Innovation in the Mathematics, Physical and Life Sciences Division. He leads a multidisciplinary research team that works across broad areas of catalysis and nanomaterials. His research is specifically targeted at finding solutions to global issues relating to energy, zero carbon and the circular economy. He has been awarded numerous awards and prizes for his creative and ground-breaking work in Inorganic Chemistry, including the Royal Society Chemistry Ludwig Mond Prize, the Royal Society Chemistry Tilden Medal and Royal Society of Chemistry Academia–Industry Prize.