Susumu Kitagawa


Susumu Kitagawa is a Japanese Nobel Prize-winning chemist specializing in coordination chemistry, with a focus on organic–inorganic hybrid compounds and the chemical and physical properties of porous coordination polymers, particularly metal-organic frameworks. He is Distinguished Professor at Kyoto University's Institute for Integrated Cell-Material Sciences, which he co-founded. In 2025, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry jointly with Richard Robson and Omar M. Yaghi.

Life

Kitagawa was born on 4 July 1951 in Kyoto.
He earned his PhD in hydrocarbon chemistry from Kyoto University in 1979, having completed his undergraduate studies at the same institution. That year, he was appointed assistant professor at Kindai University, where he was promoted to lecturer in 1983 and associate professor in 1988.
In 1992, he became professor of inorganic chemistry at Tokyo Metropolitan University. He returned to Kyoto University in 1998 as a professor of inorganic functional chemistry in the Department of Synthetic Chemistry and Biological Chemistry. In 2007, he co-founded the , serving as founding deputy director, then as director from 2013 to 2023. In 2024, he was appointed Executive Vice-President for Research Promotion at Kyoto University.
His overseas academic postings include a postdoctoral fellowship at Texas A&M University with F. Albert Cotton and a guest professorship at the City University of New York. He received an honorary doctorate from the Technical University of Munich in 2018.
Kitagawa served as a member and associate member of the Science Council of Japan from 2011 to 2023.
In 2025, Kitagawa, along with Richard Robson and Omar M. Yaghi, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their foundational work on molecular building blocks for metal-organic frameworks.

Research

Following the discoveries of Makoto Fujita and Omar M. Yaghi, Kitagawa demonstrated in 1997 that coordination polymer structures possess gas adsorption properties, a key finding for the development of functional porous materials.
His most influential works include: