Rate My Professor Susumu Kitagawa

Susumu Kitagawa is Executive Vice-President for Research Promotion and Distinguished Professor at Kyoto University, where he is also a principal investigator at the Institute for Integrated Cell-Material Sciences (iCeMS), which he co-founded. He earned his B.Sc. in 1974, M.Sc. in 1976, and Ph.D. in 1979, all from Kyoto University. His early career included positions as assistant, lecturer, and associate professor in the Department of Chemistry at Kindai University from 1979 to 1992, followed by a professorship in the Department of Chemistry at Tokyo Metropolitan University from 1992 to 1998. He then served as Professor of Synthetic Chemistry and Biological Chemistry at Kyoto University from 1998 to 2017, during which he held leadership roles including deputy director and director of iCeMS. Since 2017, he has been Distinguished Professor at the Kyoto University Institute for Advanced Study (KUIAS), with additional appointments as deputy director-general of KUIAS and, since 2024, Executive Vice-President for Research Promotion at Kyoto University.

Kitagawa’s research focuses on inorganic and materials chemistry, particularly the chemistry of coordination space. He pioneered the development of porous coordination polymers, also known as metal-organic frameworks (MOFs), demonstrating their porosity through gas sorption experiments in 1997 and advancing the field with discoveries of flexible MOFs and their functional properties for nanospace control. His work has led to applications in gas storage, purification, and separation, with broad implications for energy, environment, and materials science. He has received numerous honors, including the 2025 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the development of metal-organic frameworks, the Japan Academy Prize in 2016, the Chemistry for the Future Solvay Prize in 2017, election as a Foreign Member of the Royal Society in 2023, and the Order of Culture in 2025. Key publications include papers in Nature and Science on topics such as acetylene accommodation in MOFs (2005), soft porous crystals (2009), and shape-memory nanopores (2013). His contributions have established MOFs as a major class of porous materials and influenced global research in coordination chemistry.