A desire to swim against the current has led to a great-shaped future.
In this photograph I am standing on the bridge that I cross to and from the lab each day. I find this place incredibly beautiful. It is just pieces of concrete but assembled in a way that speaks to me.
I am a research scientist in the group of Mohamed Eddaoudi. We specialize in designing and making porous materials called metal-organic frameworks (MOFs), which have many potential uses, ranging from carbon capture to fuel tanks for hydrogen vehicles.
Eddaoudi’s vision is not to make these materials by trial and error, but to understand the fundamentals of their assembly. Once we understand that, we can design MOFs to have specific properties that can be fine-tuned on demand.
I see myself as a molecular architect. I loved studying mathematics and geometry, and I am happy that I can apply geometry principles in chemistry to design new MOFs. I like to be at the interface — having creativity while also being forced to consider what is feasible chemically.
When I first joined KAUST in 2011 as a postdoc, the Eddaoudi group was working on a “cuboctahedral” MOF building block that had only two predicted ways of assembly. You could link them with linear organic molecules or square molecules.
Other colleagues were already working on those, so I decided to swim against the current. There was no prediction for assembling these with triangles. I decided to try, and we discovered a novel MOF linker – a cluster with the highest connectivity ever observed in the field.
Read the full story at KAUST Insight.
