Milner group at Cornell University

The 2025 chemistry Nobel goes to MOFs Susumu Kitagawa, Richard Robson and Omar M. Yaghi win the prize for developing metal–organic frameworks

The 2025 #NobelPrize in Chemistry has been awarded to Susumu Kitagawa, Richard Robson and Omar M. Yaghi “for the development of metal–organic frameworks.” Stay tuned for the full story to come! cen.acs.org/people/nobel...

#ChemNobel #Chem #Chemistry #chemsky 🧪

Dynamic Evolution from Single-Atom Catalysts to Active Nanograins for CO2 Reduction Understanding dynamic catalyst evolution, particularly Cu-based single-atom catalysts, faces tremendous challenges of tracking rapid and nanoscale evolution and uncontrolled catalyst reoxidation durin...

Our new @jacs.acspublications.org paper is out! We demonstrate the formation of active Cu nanograins from single-atom catalysts under CO2 reduction conditions by different experimental techniques, including operando XAS and EC-TEM. @runofthephill.bsky.social
Click📰:
pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/...

Check out undergrad Zayim's paper on aqueous MOF synthesis, now out in JMCA! He was even able to find a new open metal site MOF that does not form under traditional solvothermal conditions. Congrats to PhD coauthors Ron, Tristan, and Clarisse!

pubs.rsc.org/en/Content/A...

High-Concentration Aqueous Synthesis of Salicylate-Based Metal-Organic Frameworks http://pubs.rsc.org/en/Content/ArticleLanding/2025/TA/D5TA04800A

Make sure you don’t miss Alexandra’s talk at #EuroMOF2025!!

Polymer connectivity governs electrophotocatalytic activity in the solid state - Nature Chemistry The combination of electricity and light can provide a sustainable route to drive challenging synthetic transformations, but current catalysts are plagued by poor stability and mechanistic ambiguity. ...

It's not just our singular abilities that make big changes, but the connections between us. At least, that's how it can be in chemistry. Congrats to Musser, Milner and team for their work @natchem.nature.com on electrophotocatalysis! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

@runofthephill.bsky.social

Defluorinative Coupling of (NH)-Heteroarenes and Unactivated Vinyl Fluorides Enabled by Metal–Organic Frameworks N-vinyl azoles are prevalent moieties in pharmaceuticals, and fluorovinyl groups are widely recognized as carbonyl bioisosteres in drug design. Thus, N-fluorovinylated heteroarenes represent highly de...

Team MOFganic strikes again! Check out our most recent work, now out in @jacs.acspublications.org!

Kaitlyn, Julia, and Jaehwan showed that vinyl fluoride gases are surprising electrophilic and react selectively with N-heterocycles!

pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10....

Come be our colleague!

Congrats to all of the award recipients including Cornell's very own Jonas and @songlin1.bsky.social and Geoff Coates!

ACS announces 2026 national award winners The winners are being acknowledged for their outstanding achievements in chemistry across various fields in the discipline

We are very excited to announce that PJM has been named a recipient of the ACS Award in Pure Chemistry! 🥳🍾🍻🎉
cen.acs.org/people/award...

Polymer connectivity governs electrophotocatalytic activity in the solid state Nature Chemistry - The combination of electricity and light can provide a sustainable route to drive challenging synthetic transformations, but current catalysts are plagued by poor stability and...

Check out Allen's paper (in collaboration with Amy, Kiser, and Juno from the X-less Musser group) on the first heterogeneous catalyst for organic electrophotocatalysis, out now in @natchem.nature.com!

rdcu.be/eAyq1

Exciting news from MOF2026! Abstract submissions are open - check it out below and share with your networks! 🎉

‘Breakthrough Science’ grant supports disease-targeting lipid research | Cornell Chronicle A grant from the Ono Pharma Breakthrough Science Initiative, which supports bold new ideas in science, will help Cornell researchers study how chemical modifications to proteins play a powerful role i...

Thanks to the Cornell Chronicle for highlighting our work supported by @onoinitiative.bsky.social!
news.cornell.edu/stories/2025...

Who knows how PJM made the cut for a keynote speaker slot at @mof2026.bsky.social but we’ll be there with bells on!

Our paper in Phys. Chem. Chem. Phys. @pccp.rsc.org with @runofthephill.bsky.social on MOF self-assembly simulations is online now, a.k.a. Lego® for MOFs.

We demonstrate the spontaneous assembly of rationally designed, coarse-grained, rigid-body models of 34 distinct MOF nets, ...

Congrats to our recent alumni Jaehwan, Tristan, and Ron who contributed to the project, and our collaborators Johari and Jung-Hoon for some clutch DFT calculations and Ben and Alex for cool SSNMR studies!

Check out 3rd year Alexandra's paper with our first PhD student Mary on direct air capture of [censored gas], now out in @jacs.acspublications.org!

pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10....

I’m immensely grateful to @onoinitiative.bsky.social for this honor and for supporting our work — and congratulations to Stacy and @angadmehta.bsky.social!

Happy 11th birthday to @andolab.bsky.social ! 🎂 🥳 Also happy to share that I'm a full prof as of July 1 -- thanks to my awesome group, past and present.

We're now looking to grow the team! Looking for someone with amazing protein skills and postdocs excited about evolutionary questions!

Graduate Field Coordinator-Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology Graduate Field Coordinator-Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology The Opportunity The Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology is seeking a dedicated and detail-oriented Graduate Field Coord...

Hello BlueSky 🦋 I'm the Director of Graduate Studies in Cornell Chemistry. We're hiring a new Graduate Field Coordinator to help support our graduate program. Please apply or repost if you know someone great! tinyurl.com/3znxx4bh

Second year Danny passed his qualifying exam today!

Is everyone on #chemsky ready for the new NIH public access policy to take effect on July 1? sharing.nih.gov/public-acces...

⭐️ fifth year PhD student Kaitlyn (who worked in the Chirik lab as a UG) traveled to the pits of New Jersey today to present her research on fluorination using MOFs at Princeton! Thanks @stache-lab.bsky.social for helping to organize 😀

Our group presented an educational activity on "crystallizing CO2" at Expand Your Horizons today! Thanks Bayu for organizing and Kaitlyn, Alexandra, Priyadarshini, Emily, Julia, Clarisse, and Katrina for leading the activity!

Check out this highlight of Zoe's paper with the Lambert group in Nature Energy!

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

This article was invited in honor of Frank who sadly passed away recently. Frank was very helpful in teaching PJM the basics of solid state chemistry (enough to take over Frank's graduate class, talk about filing some big shoes). He is sorely missed.

Congrats to Tristan, our collaborator Mark from Rigaku, and our collaborators David and Andrew for photoluminescence measurements! We hope this work will continue to "shed light" (har har) on the black box of MOF synthesis, especially for non-experts.

Kinetic Trapping of Photoluminescent Frameworks During High-Concentration Synthesis of Nonemissive Metal–Organic Frameworks Metal–organic frameworks (MOFs) are porous, crystalline materials constructed from organic linkers and inorganic nodes with potential utility in gas separation, drug delivery, sensing, and catalysis. Small variations in the MOF synthesis conditions can lead to a range of accessible frameworks with divergent chemical or photophysical properties. New methods to controllably access phases with tailored properties would broaden the scope of MOFs that can be reliably prepared for specific applications. Herein, we demonstrate that simply increasing the reaction concentration during the solvothermal synthesis of M2(dobdc) (M = Mg, Mn, Ni; dobdc4– = 2,5-dioxido-1,4-benzenedicarboxylate) MOFs unexpectedly leads to trapping of a new framework termed CORN-MOF-1 (CORN = Cornell University) instead. In-depth spectroscopic, crystallographic, and computational studies support that CORN-MOF-1 has a structure similar to that of M2(dobdc) but with partially protonated linkers and charge-balancing or coordinated formate groups in the pores. The resultant variation in linker spacing causes CORN-MOF-1 (Mg) to be strongly photoluminescent in the solid state, whereas H4dobdc and Mg2(dobdc) are weakly emissive due to excimer formation. In-depth photophysical studies suggest that CORN-MOF-1 (Mg) is the first MOF based on the H2dobdc2– linker that likely does not emit via an excited-state intramolecular proton transfer (ESIPT) pathway. In addition, CORN-MOF-1 variants can be converted to high-quality samples of the thermodynamic M2(dobdc) phases by heating in N,N-dimethylformamide (DMF). Overall, our findings support that high-concentration synthesis provides a straightforward method to identify new MOFs with properties distinct from known materials and to produce highly porous samples of MOFs, paving the way for the discovery and gram-scale synthesis of framework materials.

This work is the latest in our series of studies of user-friendly MOF synthesis and builds upon our previous work finding a mysterious MOF simply by increasing the concentration of MOF-74 synthesis (pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/...). This is our "go-to" MOF for fluorinated gas and H2S delivery.

Controlled Growth and Interconversion of Photoluminescent Metal–Organic Frameworks under High-Concentration Conditions A major drawback to the implementation of metal–organic frameworks (MOFs) on scale is the vast quantity of organic solvents, typically N,N-dimethylformamide (DMF), required to synthesize even small qu...

Check out Tristan's recent work in honor of the late great Frank Disalvo, out now in Chemistry of Materials! Including some cool microED data we collected with Rigaku to elucidate the structure of the mysterious metallocrown ether framework CORN-MOF-1!

pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10....

The 2025 ACS Chemical Biology Young Investigator Award goes to Professor Jeremy Baskin! Congrats to Jeremy & our other esteemed presenters for yesterday's great symposium!
Jennifer Prescher, @jeremybaskin.bsky.social, Carsten Schultz, @chembiobryan.bsky.social, @sonjakrane.bsky.social, @pubs.acs.org