A life in context
The person behind the prize
Robson received his doctorate at Oxford and developed his research career in Australia. At Melbourne he explored how the preferred bonding directions of metal atoms could guide the construction of extended structures. This was an architectural way of thinking about chemistry.
The contribution
He showed that metal centres and organic linkers could assemble into open, ordered networks. His early frameworks helped establish the design principle behind the field, even when the first structures were not yet robust.
The idea in plain language
A metal–organic framework, or MOF, is an extended structure made by linking metal centres with carbon-containing molecules. The result can contain many tiny pores: an enormous internal surface tucked inside a small amount of solid.
Read the full award story ↗
