“My name is Richard Robson. I’ve been at the University of Melbourne since 1966,” he says, with the casual precision of a man who has lived most of a life in one place. The image is homely and immediate: a long career, a kitchen table, a phone call.
Robson remembers the night the Nobel committee rang — “I did finish my fish. It was a bit cold, but I got there. And then I had to do the washing up,” he said — and the domestic detail does more than amuse. It pins an extraordinary moment to the ordinary rhythms that shaped it.
Robson shares the 2025 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Susumu Kitagawa and Omar M Yaghi “for the development of metal-organic frameworks” — a type of material built like a microscopic scaffold, with lots of empty space inside.
Imagine a building made of tiny corridors and rooms that only molecules can enter. By changing the parts used to build the scaffold, chemists can make the rooms act like traps, filters or tiny reaction chambers.
That flexibility is what makes these materials useful: they can hold gases, pull water out of dry air, catch pollutants or help speed up chemical reactions in ways that ordinary materials cannot.
The idea did not arrive fully for3med. Professor Robson tells how, in the 1970s, his teaching duties included making wooden models for first-year lectures: spheres with precisely drilled holes, connected by rods to show atomic geometry.
As he assembled those models, “the thought arose, what if we used molecules in place of the balls and chemical bonds in place of the rods? And everything else follows from that.”
The leap was simple to picture: replace the wooden balls with specially shaped molecules, and the rods with chemical links, and the same geometry would appear at a molecular scale.
The spaces inside those molecular lattices are like tiny rooms — too small to see, but big enough to hold gas molecules or small liquids. That throwaway sentence is the origin story — a leap from physical model to molecular architecture.
It seeded work that would become MOFs, first reported in the late 1980s, when Robson and his collaborators produced crystalline structures with repeating cavities that hinted at practical use.
He is frank about his own role. “I was just a hand waver. A sort of archetype,” he said in an interview, crediting the crystallographers and students around him for turning rough ideas into rigorous science.
Bernard Hoskins and, later, Brendan Abrahams provided the structural proofs that turned intuitive models into mapped, reproducible lattices.
Asked when he realised the field might grow, Robson said it was “almost immediately” after the first publications — an early certainty that the geometry he’d sketched could become a toolbox for chemists.
The scaffold was simple, but the consequences were extraordinary.
Metal-organic frameworks or MOFs are not science theatre; they are working materials. Because their internal rooms can be designed precisely, researchers have used them in a few practical ways that matter for the environment.
Some MOFs act like sieves that pick out carbon dioxide from a stream of gases, concentrating it so it can be stored or converted.
Others capture tiny amounts of water from humid air, giving a way to harvest drinking water in dry places.
Some are built to grab persistent pollutants — the chemicals that resist normal filtration — and hold them so they can be removed from water.
MOFs can also act as little factories: a molecule enters the channel, encounters a catalytic site inside the framework, reacts, and then leaves — that makes some chemical processes cheaper or cleaner than before.
These are not miracle cures, but practical tools. The big idea is modularity: because chemists can mix and match the building pieces, they can tailor MOFs for specific jobs where existing materials struggle.
Kitagawa and Yaghi helped turn Robson’s early structures into more usable forms — one showed how the frameworks could flex and let gases flow in and out, the other built sturdier versions and methods to design them deliberately.
Together, the three laureates gave chemists a reliable set of design rules and materials to test for real-world problems.
That practical arc — from a classroom model to machines that might capture greenhouse gases or supply water — is also a story about time.
Robson admits he has been “retired for a long while” and that he is “out of touch” with much of current work, yet his early experiments offered the design logic others scaled and stabilised.
Kitagawa and Yaghi, the co-laureates, developed flexibility, stability and rational design rules that turned Robson’s frameworks into millions of possible architectures, and then into thousands already tested for real-world tasks.
The result is a field rich in promise and early demonstrations, moving slowly from lab curiosities into industrial contenders.
Robson’s voice in the interviews is quietly amused about himself: “I’ve been isolated most of my life,” he says, and yet the record shows collaboration was essential.
He speaks warmly of students — “the ones I did have were good” — and of colleagues who lent technical muscle to his ideas.
That mix — an obsessive attention to a small problem, and the humility to let others prove the maths — is the running note of his career.
When asked what brought him to chemistry, he admitted he had “drifted into it” rather than chosen it for glory; and when told the field’s growth was inevitable, he called the work “very common sense.”
There is no grand myth here, only a patient intellectual habit: notice odd geometry, sketch it, test it, and keep returning to it.
At 88, Robson is unshowy about accolades. “There are upsides and downsides, and I’m quite old now, and handling all the nonsense that’s going to happen is going to be hard work,” he told the Nobel callers.
His calm is characteristic: years of lectures, late nights in workshops, decades of experiments have bred a composure that reads as both weary and bemused. Yet the larger point his story offers is anything but modest.
It says that patient curiosity, rooted in teaching and the ordinary workbench, can yield tools that help tackle planetary problems — provided the apparatus of science, from students to sustained funding, is allowed to run its long course.
Robson’s fish-and-washing-up anecdote will likely outlive his complaints about publicity. It anchors a life of slow, accumulative invention in scenes everyone knows.
The prize is for a molecular idea that made room — literally — for new chemistry. In a warming, thirsty world, those rooms may yet turn out to be very useful.
