TWO NOBEL PRIZES AWARDED TO BERKELEY PROFESSORS

In what’s seemingly becoming an annual tradition each fall, two more Nobel Prizes were received this week by UC Berkeley professors.

Professor John Clarke received a 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics. Prof. Clarke is an emeritus professor of physics at the school currently. His work in particular was that of quantum tunneling, one of many strange aspects of quantum mechanics. He shares the prize with two other physicists, Michel H. Devoret and John M. Martinis, who at the time of their prize-winning research were at UC Berkeley. Devoret is now at Yale University and UC Santa Barbara, while Martinis is at UC Santa Barbara.

Then the following day, it was announced that Omar Yaghi, a Jordanian-American chemist on campus, was awarded the 2025 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. He shares it with Richard Robson of the University of Melbourne, Australia, and Susumu Kitagawa of Kyoto University, Japan.

“The scientists were cited for creating “molecular constructions with large spaces through which gases and other chemicals can flow. These constructions, metal-organic frameworks, can be used to harvest water from desert air, capture carbon dioxide, store toxic gases or catalyze chemical reactions.” You can read the full article here.

According to Berkeley News, the Nobel Prize committee honored Clarke’s team “for the discovery of macroscopic quantum mechanical tunneling and energy quantization in an electric circuit.” The discovery laid the foundation for superconducting quantum bits, or qubits, at the heart of many of today’s quantum computers. Congrats once again to UC Berkeley professors receiving these prestigious awards.