Susumu Kitagawa: ‘I tell my students three words: luck, stubbornness and perseverance’

Susumu Kitagawa is a professor of chemistry at the University of Kyoto in Japan. He won the 2025 Nobel prize in chemistry, along with Omar Yaghi and Richard Robson, for his work on metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) and other porous materials.

I like reading. One person experiences only a narrow window of life but reading means that I have various types of experiences. As a kid, I would read all sorts. I liked the story of Einstein. I liked books by Hideyo Noguchi, who was a famous Japanese bacteriologist. These inspired me about science.