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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Professor Atsushi Urakawa obtained his PhD in 2006 at ETH Zurich (Switzerland). Then, he worked as a Senior Scientist and Lecturer at ETH Zurich before joining ICIQ (Spain) in 2010 as a Group Leader. In 2019, he took on a new challenge as Professor of Catalysis Engineering at ChemE, TU Delft. His research group is dedicated to developing novel heterogeneous catalysts and catalytic processes that minimize energy usage and reduce negative impacts on the environment and human health. By employing a multidisciplinary approach that integrates material science, reaction engineering, and in situ/operando methodologies, they aim to gain a thorough understanding of active sites and transformation pathways. Their primary target reactions include CO2 conversion to valuable chemicals, methane activation, environmental catalysis (NOx abatement), and hydrogen production through electro- and photocatalytic activation. He was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry (FRSC) in 2016 and has received numerous accolades, including the JSPS Prize (2020) and The Japan Academy Medal (2021).
Professor Graham J. Hutchings
Professor Menachem Elimelech
Professor Seeram Ramakrishna
Professor Bart van der Bruggen
Professor João A. P. Coutinho
Professor Markus Antonietti
Professor Lutz Ackermann
