A Nobel Prize-winning scientist who is moving from Berkeley to Beijing has hit out at increasingly restrictive visa policies hampering international scientific collaboration as he prepares to leave the US.

In what some regard as a watershed moment for Chinese science, Omar Yaghi announced  that he is joining Tsinghua University to further his artificial intelligence-focused research on ultra-porous materials that can suck pollution or water from the air, vacating his professorship at the University of California, Berkeley where he has worked since 2012.

Born in Jordan to Palestinian refugee parents, Yaghi moved to the US at the age of 15 to pursue his education in the early 1980s, eventually  for their work on metal-organic frameworks and reticular chemistry.

The departure of a Nobel-winning scientist from a top American research university to China has been hailed as a major coup for Chinese science, potentially marking the acceleration of a West-to-East brain drain that has until now mainly involved returning Chinese scientists.

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Speaking to Times Higher Education, Yaghi said he was disappointed by recent policy changes in the US but also other Western nations that had inhibited scientific mobility and cooperation.

Asked if US science policies were enabling important scientific collaboration between countries, Yaghi said: “We’re going exactly in the opposite direction.”

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“Our budgets are strapped, we have geopolitical issues with immigration and we’re becoming less and less generous with giving visas,” he said, in contrast to the trend in the rest of the world.

“This creates that despair and hopelessness that scientists under 30 are feeling,” continued Yaghi, speaking earlier this month at the Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting, a scientific summit held annually in southern Germany.

With US research budgets cut by the Trump administration and fewer visas issued to overseas scientists, academic couples – where both are researchers – were finding it harder to secure posts in the same country, said Yaghi.

“It’s hard for scientists. It’s hard to be married and your spouse is in another country, and you’re trying to be in a lab and make discoveries. You need stability of home to have the freedom in your mind to do science – to attend to the arduous process of doing science, learning and ultimately making discoveries.”

Easing visa restrictions for scientists should be accompanied by more funding for international research, said Yaghi, whose own work brings together teams from Russia, China, the US, Saudi Arabia and numerous other nations.

“We need to start thinking about education and international engagement as the fourth pillar of an educational institution,” argued Yaghi. “We have research, education, service to society and the institution but we need to add international engagement as the fourth pillar. And we need to take it seriously,” he said.

“We need to put resources behind it because it helps us and, importantly, it helps build talent around the world, which ultimately feeds back into in terms of economic benefits and research discoveries,” he said.

Although international mobility was important, Yaghi said, it was also vital that “research-strong” countries did not raid scientific talent from less well resourced nations.

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“We have built a system in which talent comes to research-strong countries but there is more talent now in the world than we have capacity in these research-strong countries. One part of my mission is international cooperation and engagement but what happens if I can’t engage because I don’t have the capacity [to accept] talent? What should we do given this mismatch between capacity and demand, which is closing opportunities for the very talent that we need to make a better world?” asked Yaghi.

The risks posed by this mismatch have led him to found a new venture called the Yaghi Science Institutes, which would “plug in to talent on the ground in about 30 countries and provide opportunities for people to start doing research and learn about how to make scientific discoveries”.

With the aim of “building around talent” rather than bringing younger scientists to Western countries, the institutes would close the “knowledge distribution gap”, he said.

Based at universities and co-funded by governments, the institutes will be “run by a young upcoming star and I, along with many of my colleagues and Nobel laureates and others, will mentor this director of research,” he said.

“It will typically be a young professor who’s trying to build a group, and these research-based institutes will take things from molecule to society, meaning we’ll do the basic science but we’ll also go all the way to applications and commercialisation,” he said, explaining they will have both a “non-profit aspect but also a for-profit aspect so when you have that discovery you can spin it out”.

“We have an investment fund that will invest in these start-ups and help them succeed,” he said, adding that the “difference between what I’m doing now and what I’ve been doing for the last 15 years is that all of this would be linked by AI and robotics, and so all data will be shared, would be put into the model, and the model will get better and better, so that we can spit back into the institutes better predictions, and that would be done by a for-profit company.”

“The two need to go hand in hand because we, as a society, cannot spend the money that basic research requires because it’s a lot of money. It’s expensive if you rule out a commercial outcome,” he added, explaining that the venture echoes several new initiatives that combine both philanthropy and for-profit elements aiming to build science-related spin-outs.

“I’m not saying let’s compromise the basic research. We want the basic research because that’s what strengthens how you think outside the box and how to make great inventions. But once you make those inventions, you want to drive them all the way to society. Without those two things going hand in hand, you’re not going to build a thriving endeavour,” said Yaghi.

Reflecting on his own journey and his new project, Yaghi said: “If I had the opportunity in Jordan, I wouldn’t have had to leave Jordan and leave behind a vacuum.”

“While I benefited personally, my departure didn’t help Jordan, and the loss of talent today will certainly not help emerging economies or the research-strong countries in the long run either,” he added.

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jack.grove@timeshighereducation.com