Susumu Kitagawa

Susumu Kitagawa is exactly the kind of scientist I find quietly heroic. His work on porous coordination polymers and metal-organic frameworks reads, to a layperson like me, almost like architecture at the molecular scale: designing materials full of deliberate empty space to capture and channel gases. The path from a Kyoto University training to the Clarivate Citation laureate list and ultimately a Nobel Prize reflects decades of patient, unglamorous accumulation. I admire that he chose depth over spectacle. There is something deeply moving about world-changing knowledge emerging not from noise, but from one chemist's sustained curiosity in Kyoto.

Name (English)

Susumu Kitagawa

Name (Japanese)

北川進

Reading

きたがわ すすむ

Born

July 4, 1951 (age 75)

Zodiac / Chinese zodiac

Cancer / Rabbit

Origin

Kyoto, Kyoto Prefecture, Japan

Occupation

chemist / university teacher

University

Kyoto University

Awards & achievements

• 2013 De Gennes Prize
• 2010 Clarivate Citation Laureates
• 2017 Ernest Solvay Prize

• Official sitehttps://www.kitagawa.icems.kyoto-u.ac.jp/?lang=en
• Wikipedia (English)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susumu%20Kitagawa
• Wikipedia (Japanese)https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%8C%97%E5%B7%9D%E9%80%B2
• Wikidatahttps://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q11401680

Tags

• Kyoto Prefecture
• chemist
• university teacher

Last updated

2026-06-21

Facts are limited to publicly available information up to 2024; non-public or unconfirmed items are omitted. English text is machine-assisted (facts translated by Sonnet, "My Take" written by Opus 4.8). The Japanese page is the source of record.