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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Dr. Jeremy P. Allen joined the Royal Society of Chemistry in 2014 as a Publishing Editor, initially working on the journals Physical Chemistry Chemical Physics and Nanoscale. In 2018, he became the Deputy Editor for Chemical Science. Since early 2022, Dr. Allen has served as the Executive Editor for Materials Advances and Nanoscale Advances, leading the development of these journals and collaborating closely with their Editorial Boards. He is also the Executive Editor of two newly launched journals, RSC Applied Interfaces and RSC Applied Polymers.
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