Professor Seth Cohen (UC San Diego)

Title: A Metal-organic Framework ‘String-Along’

Abstract: Metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) are a class of inorganic-organic porous solids that have been of interest for a wide range of potential applications from energy to medicine. October 8, 2025 was an exciting day for the MOF community, where these materials (or more specifically their co-inventors) were recognized with the 2025 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Conventionally, MOFs are constructed from metal ions (or metal ion clusters) and rigid, highly ‘directional’ organic ligands containing metal coordination groups. Rigidity and directionality have generally been considered requirements for forming the highly periodic, crystalline, and persistently porous structures of MOFs. As part of an ongoing eOort in our laboratory to integrate MOFs with organic polymers, this presentation will describe the use of flexible oligomers or polymers to form crystalline ‘oligoMOFs’ or ‘polyMOFs’. The characteristics of these MOF-like materials and the ability of their underlying organic building blocks to change the structure and properties of the MOF will be detailed. It is expected that oligoMOFs, polyMOFs, and other MOF-polymer composites are both fundamentally interesting pursuits in materials chemistry, but also may help advance the utilization of MOFs into commercial technologies.

Biography: Seth M. Cohen is a native of the San Fernando Valley located in the suburbs of Los Angeles, California. He earned degrees from Stanford University (B.S. Chemistry, B.A. Political Science) and U.C. Berkeley (Ph.D. Chemistry), and was an NIH Postdoctoral Fellow at M.I.T. He is currently a Distinguished Professor and holds the Chancellor’s Distinguished Professorship in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at U.C. San Diego. His current research spans topics in materials, polymer, medicinal, and bioinorganic chemistry, with potential applications ranging from energy sciences to drug development. He is an elected fellow of the American Chemical Society (ACS), the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC), and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). His research and teaching activities have been recognized by several awards including the ACS Cope Scholar Award, the RSC Centenary Prize, the CSW Hillebrand Award, the Freeman Lectureship, the Alexander von Humboldt Research Award, and the RCSA TREE and IMPACT Awards. In addition to his research and teaching, Prof. Cohen has served two terms with the federal government, once as a science policy AAAS Fellowat the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), and a second time as a Program Manager in the Biological Technologies Office (BTO) at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), for which he was awarded the DARPA Meritorious Public Service Medal. He is also the co- founder of several startup companies, including Blacksmith Medicines, where he currently is a consultant and a member of the Scientific Advisory Board.