In the first episode of The Short Version, Associate Professor Jeremy Feldblyum of UAlbany's Chemistry Department takes us into the beautifully ordered world of metal-organic frameworks, the extraordinary branch of science that landed UAlbany alumni Omar M. Yaghi a share of the 2025 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
Jeremy Feldblyum is not just an accomplished chemist and teacher; he holds a bachelor of music from the University of Maryland in piano performance. The intermingling of science and art — and the possibility of one inspiring the other — carries poetic potential too strong to ignore. So of course, we had to ask: Is tuning a MOF like tuning a piano?
Here's what Jeremy said:
"Many people ask if there’s a connection between my music and science, and I always have the disappointing answer that as far as I know, I have not found a relationship between the two. Even the music I listen to in my office is not piano music. That would be too distracting.
When I studied piano during undergrad, I played at a level that made me happy — after much struggling and a lot of time in the practice room. That kind of work ethic and obsession that I actually first had in music, not so much in chemistry, helped me to shift gears when I got to graduate school. I knew I had to lay music aside — not completely — but that I had let that go a little bit to give myself time and space for science, which I threw myself into wholeheartedly. And I would say that up to that point, my passion in music set my science back a little bit. I probably did not study chemistry quite so much as I should have as an undergraduate. But as a graduate student, I had the work ethic. I knew how to be obsessed with something, and I threw myself into chemistry feet first. By the end of graduate school, I was quite happy. I felt, finally I could do research successfully. And I didn’t have to be miserable while doing it, as many grad students are. So perhaps that work ethic is the closest relationship between them. But otherwise, music just makes me happy, and when I’m happy, I do my science well."
And while chemistry might have the spotlight for the moment, Jeremy still finds time to play — even with his hands full.
"I have two very young kids now, and so I'm learning some left-hand repertoire while I'm holding the baby in the other arm."
Learn more about the Feldblyum Group
Read a MOF Nobel explainer with Jeremy
Here from Omar Yaghi directly via the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences
Explore everything happening on campus with the University at Albany Events Calendar
Research and interview by Erin Frick
Audio editing and production by Scott Freedman
Photos by Patrick Dodson
Written and hosted by Jordan Carleo-Evangelist
0:01 Jordan Carleo-Evangelist
Welcome to The Short Version, the UAlbany podcast that tackles big ideas, big questions and big news in less time than it takes to cross the Academic Podium. I'm Jordan Carleo-Evangelist in UAlbany’s Office of Communications & Marketing.
If you're like me, when you woke up on Oct. 8 to the incredible news that UAlbany alum Omar Yaghi would share the 2025 Nobel Prize for chemistry, you squinted at your phone and let out something like a joyous yelp.
The next thing you did was open your favorite AI app.
What, I sleepily tapped into my iPhone, are metal organic frameworks? Explain it to me like I'm 10. Use analogies.
Jeremy Feldblyum is not like me.
Not only is Jeremy an associate professor of chemistry in the same department that nurtured Yaghi's young interest in science, he's an expert in — you guessed it — metal organic frameworks. MOFs, as they are often called, are artificially engineered chemical structures that can be manipulated for a wide range of uses — from energy storage to battery recycling to purifying water and mimicking certain biological functions inside our bodies.
They are, as Jeremy described to my colleague Erin Frick, like the Swiss Army Knives of modern science and technology. Yet, like so many amazing innovations that quietly touch our daily lives, most of us have never heard of them.
In this first episode of The Short Version, Jeremy explained what makes a MOF a MOF and reflects on the virtues of obsession, hard work and the highs and lows of a life in science. He also shares his perspective on what Yaghi's Nobel win means for UAlbany students today.
We hope this will be the first of many short but illuminating conversations with the knowers, doers and makers on campus — the people whose knowledge and experiences make life at UAlbany endlessly fascinating.
So, more to come.
But for now, here's Jeremy taking us inside the beautifully ordered world of MOFs.
2:02 Jeremy Feldblyum
Well, I guess I should start from the beginning, which is my grandfather actually was a chemist. But growing up, I wouldn't say I necessarily had an interest in chemistry. There was a whole separate goal of becoming a concert pianist that intervened at the beginning of college, and through my undergraduate (study). I have a degree in piano performance. I loved music, but I also loved science at the same time, and I started doing research in labs and went to graduate school in polymer science and engineering. One guy who I met worked with these things called metal organic frameworks, or MOFs, which I had never heard of.
From the outside, MOFs look very unremarkable. They look like table salt. And sometimes with a little color, a little blue, a little green, but for the most part, you couldn't tell the difference between that and anything else in your kitchen. On the inside, that's where all the interesting things are happening. And so MOFs on the inside look like the frame of a building that is under construction. And so if you imagine steel girders in metal organic frameworks are the organic component. And so that represents we'll say the beams of the scaffold. And then the cement or the glue that holds the beams together are metal ions or metal atoms.
The properties of MOFs, because these are empty cells so to speak, lend them to many different applications. And so you can think of a MOF almost as a new kind of blank slate material that is customizable to many, many different areas of science. What it can do depends on the chemist and their creativity and their ability to construct these things towards particular applications. There are startup companies that are trying to use MOFs in applications ranging from components in batteries to soaking up and deactivating poison gas and nerve agents. The applications of MOFs really are as varied as one can think of for applications for anything in chemistry. We can create very, very small MOFs that can be injected and then target particular organs or target cancer.
We have many interests with metal-organic frameworks. Nothing I say here is myself alone. I want to acknowledge all the undergraduate and graduate students that work in my research group. The students are really executing these projects and doing so very well. We're looking at battery recycling, which is a huge issue. Pulling out the cobalt and lithium and manganese separately from a spent battery is very difficult. Because metal organic frameworks have these tunable characteristics, we can actually build metal organic frameworks that have a particular affinity for lithium or for cobalt or for manganese. The way that we make these things is actually fairly simple. We take the carbon hydrogen component and we take the metal component, as a salt usually, and we mix them in a liquid and we leave it in the oven overnight and when we come in in the morning we either have nothing, or we have beautiful crystals. When it's there it's wonderful. When it's not there, it's miserable. I think this is one of the things that graduate students feel very viscerally and undergraduates who do research in the lab.
Of course, as a professor, I'm down the hall from the ovens, so I don't feel that moment quite the same way. But I will say that kind of uncertainty of whether or not an experiment will work is inherent to the scientific process. In science, we can make educated guesses. We see this MOF forms and that MOF forms. We never know what the probability is, though, when we execute the experiment. All we can do is go to the lab and try it. And often it fails. More often — much more often — it fails than it succeeds. And the only solution to that challenge is hard work. It is always an interplay between we'll say intuition and knowledge and dumb luck. But we create our luck and so we can still be successful in that way.
It is wonderful to me that I can bring this up in the classroom. I can bring this up to my students. Yaghi came here with very little means and many of our students come from some very adverse circumstances. But here's the fact. We have someone with a very challenging upbringing who is able to work very hard and innovate and pull themselves to the very, very highest level of science. I truly believe that there is no barrier for our students to achieve similarly now and in the future.
I love my work. It doesn't feel like work. I love doing science in the same way that a musician loves their instrument. And so I think it's important to find those passions where one does feel obsessed. And it's okay to dig in a little and to forget what time it is in pursuit of those things as long as of course they're productive and fulfilling. And it is not a bad thing to really dig in and to really try to squeeze a little more out of one's own potential.
7:04: Jordan Carleo-Evangelist
That was Jeremy Feldblyum of UAlbany's Department of Chemistry.
Jeremy took us inside the vacant skyscrapers of metal organic frameworks and reflected on how chemist Omar Yaghi's Nobel Prize-winning career began right here at the University at Albany.
To learn more about how discipline honed at a piano as a young musician taught Jeremy how to be a successful researcher in grad school, be sure to check out The Long(er) Version in our show notes.
Omar Yaghi's Nobel prize isn't the only big news on campus lately.
In September, UAlbany once again earned the Seal of Excelencia for its work to ensure the success of Latina and Latino students — remaining the only public institution in New York to earn the rigorous certification once, let alone twice.
The Campus Center West Auditorium has a new look and a new name—the Monte Lipman and Avery Lipman Republic Records Music Hall — thanks to the generosity of the enterprising UAlbany alums who founded Republic Records and made it synonymous with some of the most famous musicians in the world.
And last week we learned that UAlbany’s RNA Institute, in partnership with Virginia Commonwealth University, will share in a $6.5 million National Institutes of Health grant to launch a prestigious Wellstone Muscular Dystrophy Research Center. That's one of just six such research centers in the nation.
We hope to learn more about that work in a future episode.
Looking ahead to next week:
NANOember — UAlbany’s annual celebration of all things very, very, very, very small — continues at 6 p.m. Monday with a talk from Associate Professor Janet Paluh on Neuroscience Nanotechnology and what it means for spinal cord injuries and heart disease.
Also Monday, the women’s basketball team continues their home season — the Great Danes' eighth under Head Coach Colleen Mullen — against Dartmouth at the Broadview Center. That tip is at 6:30, and as always, students get in free.
On Tuesday, which is also Veterans Day, the College of Emergency Preparedness, Homeland Security and Cybersecurity will host its annual LEGO Challenge for kids ages 5-10. The free event runs from 9 a.m. to noon at ETEC, and advance registration is required.
You’ll find links for all these stories and more in the Today at UAlbany News Center — and a link the full calendar of University Events in our show notes.
The Short Version would not be possible without contributions from many people, including for this episode:
Research and writing by my colleague Erin Frick, who — although you didn’t hear her voice — also interviewed Jeremy for the podcast.
Scott Freedman and Brian Busher provided audio production and editing support from the UAlbany Digital Media studio deep inside the Podium tunnels.
Maya Elson in UAlbany’s Marketing Department came up with the name for the podcast.
Lastly, be sure to check out our first EXTRA SHORT, a bonus episode we released today featuring Assistant Professor Michael Yeung and a different kind of spicy chemistry.
We'll be back next Wednesday with another episode.
Thanks for taking a minute with us. I'm Jordan Carleo-Evangelist here at the University at Albany, and this has been The Short Version.