Professor and cyclist Ben L. Feringa (1951) was awarded the 2016 Nobel Prize in Chemistry together with Professor Jean-Pierre Sauvage (France) and Professor Sir James Fraser Stoddart (UK) for their work on the development of molecular machines. Feringa has been Professor of Organic Chemistry since 1988. He is one of the best scientists of our era, both within the Netherlands and worldwide. His research performance is so exceptional that he is generally regarded as one of the world’s most creative and productive chemists.

His discovery in 1999 of the ‘molecular motor’, a light-driven rotating molecule, is widely recognized as a world-class breakthrough. The potential applications of this concept are as numerous as they are spectacular. The idea that molecular motors can transport themselves through the bloodstream in order to deliver drugs to previously unreachable locations in the human body with a high degree of accuracy is particularly inspiring. It is partly thanks to Feringa that the University of Groningen is indisputably number one in Europe in the field of chemistry.