Chemistry in the Age of Abundance: Balzan Lecture by Omar Yaghi

Omar Yaghi, winner of the 2024 Balzan Prize for Nanoporous Materials for Environmental Applications, will deliver a lecture co-hosted by the International Balzan Foundation and the Collegium Helveticum. In the Balzan Lecture 2026, Omar Yaghi will discuss how today, chemists can make more molecules and materials with greater diversity and multiplicity than ever before. This is certainly true in reticular chemistry, where hundreds of thousands of metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) and covalent organic frameworks (COFs) have been reported. With AI and robotics, the ability to make more compounds is vastly expanded, raising the question of how chemists can transform their field from one of scarcity to one of abundance. Yaghi will also discuss how AI and robotics are being deployed in reticular ch