Ben Feringa

Ben Feringa is the 2016 Nobel Laureate in Chemistry and one of the most imaginative chemists alive — the man who made a molecule spin, built the world’s first nanocar, and opened the door to a future where machines operate at the scale of individual atoms. As Jacobus van’t Hoff Distinguished Professor of Molecular Sciences at the University of Groningen‘s Stratingh Institute for Chemistry, Feringa has spent four decades pushing chemistry into territory that once existed only in science fiction.

Nobel Prize speaker Ben Feringa is best known for designing and synthesizing molecular machines — nanoscale devices built from molecules that can move, rotate, and perform work in response to external stimuli such as light. In 1999, he achieved a landmark breakthrough: the first synthetic molecular motor capable of spinning continuously and unidirectionally, driven by light. It was a moment the Nobel Committee later compared to the earliest electric motors of the 1830s — primitive devices that eventually gave rise to washing machines, fans, and food processors. Feringa went on to use his molecular motors to rotate a glass cylinder 10,000 times the motor’s own size, to design a four-wheeled molecular nanocar that moves across surfaces, and to develop molecular switches that can turn drug activity on and off using light — a field he helped pioneer known as photopharmacology. His lab’s most recent work, published in 2025, demonstrates light-driven molecular motor phospholipids integrated into cell membranes and light-activated drug delivery systems with real anti-tumour efficacy in cancer cells.

The scope of his research is matched by the depth of its recognition. Feringa has received over fifty international awards, including the Spinoza Prize — the Netherlands’ highest scientific honour — the Körber European Science Prize, the Paracelsus Medal, the Solvay Prize for Chemistry for the Future, and the Centenary Prize of the Royal Society of Chemistry. He is a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a Foreign Associate of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. In 2008, Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands appointed him a Knight of the Order of the Netherlands Lion — a distinction later elevated to Commander by King Willem-Alexander following the Nobel Prize.

The Molecular Machine Revolution

Feringa’s work sits at the intersection of chemistry, nanotechnology, medicine, and materials science — a convergence that makes his science unusually relevant to audiences far beyond the laboratory. Molecular machines are already being explored as targeted cancer therapies that drill into tumour cells, light-activated antibiotics that can be switched on at the site of infection to counter resistance, smart drug delivery capsules activated by a flash of visible light, and responsive materials with programmable mechanical behaviour. The Nobel Committee framed it precisely: molecular machines today are where electric motors were in the 1830s — the technology is real, the applications are just beginning.

As a speaker, Ben Feringa brings extraordinary warmth, curiosity, and narrative energy to the stage. A farmer’s son from rural Groningen who fell in love with chemistry and built one of the world’s most celebrated research groups, he talks about the joy of discovery in a way that captivates scientists and non-scientists alike. Audiences leave with a genuine sense of wonder at what chemistry can do — and a compelling vision of the nanoscale future being built, molecule by molecule, right now.