Susumu Kitagawa received his Ph. D. at Kyoto University and is now Distinguished Professor of Kyoto University, and Director of Institute for Integrated Cell-Material Sciences (WPI-iCeMS) at Kyoto University. 
His main research fields are coordination chemistry, in particular, chemistry of coordination space, and his current research interests are centered on synthesis and properties of porous coordination polymers (PCPs) /metal-organic frameworks (MOFs).
Kitagawa was the first to demonstrate “porosity” for coordination networks with gas sorption experiments (1997). He pioneered a new type of MOFs with structural flexibility and coined soft porous crystals for them, which show unique porous properties dissimilar to those of conventional porous materials. To date, MOFs are classified as a new category of porous materials, as opposed to the conventional classifications of inorganic and carbon materials.
He received many awards such as Humboldt Research Award (2008), The Chemical Society of Japan Award (2009), Thomson Reuters Citation Laureate (2010), The RSC de Gennes Prize (2013), Japan Academy Award (2016) , Fred Basolo Medal (2016), Chemistry for the Future Solvay Prize (2017) and Grand Prix of the Fondation de la maison de la chimie, France(2018)