Ben L. Feringa, born in 1951 in the Netherlands, holds the prestigious position of Jacobus H. van‘t Hoff Distinguished Professor of Molecular Sciences at the University of Groningen and is the founding director of the Center for Systems Chemistry at the University of Groningen.

In his career as an organic chemist he has been able to provide major contri-butions to a wide area of research topics including stereochemistry, organic synthesis, asymmetric cata-lysis, molecular switches and motors, self-assembly, molecular nanosystems and photopharmacology. Throughout his career he has authored over 750 publications and accumulated over 30,000 citations.

Feringa’s research has been recognized with a number of awards including the Pino Gold Medal of the Società Chimica Italiana (1997), the Körber European Science Award (2003), the Spinoza Award (2004), the Prelog Gold Medal for Stereochemistry (2005), the James Flack Norrish Award in Physical Organic Chemistry of the ACS (2007), the Paracel-sus Medal of the Swiss Chemical Society (2008), the Chirality Medal (2009), the RSC Organic Stereoche-mistry Award (2011), the Alexander-von-Humboldt Award (2012), the Nagoya Gold Medal (2013) and an ACS Cope Scholar Award (2015). 

He was elected Foreign Honory member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and member and vice-president of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences. In 2008 he was appointed Academy Professor and was knigh-ted by Her Majesty the Queen of the Netherlands.