他归功美国公立大学系统

Omar M. Yaghi received his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and is a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. Dr. Yaghi was born to Palestinian refugees who settled in Jordan, and moved to New York for college, first at Hudson Valley Community College in Troy. He switched to the State University of New York at Albany in 1983.

In a phone interview posted by the Nobel committee, Dr. Yaghi said while waiting for an airplane to take off that he grew up in a “very humble home,” sharing a room with the cattle his family raised. His parents could barely read or write, he said.

In a news conference hosted later by Berkeley, Dr. Yaghi credited the American public university system for what he had achieved, and added that getting his first grant from the National Science Foundation ultimately led to his Nobel Prize.

Science, he reflected during the earlier phone interview, “is the greatest equalizing force in the world.”