Bernard Feringa

Born on 18 May 1951 in Barger-Compascuum, Netherlands, Bernard Feringa is a chemist who was awarded the 2016 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his groundbreaking work on molecular machines. Feringa studied at the University of Groningen, where he received his PhD in chemistry in 1978. After working six years as a research scientist for Royal Dutch Shell, he joined the faculty of Groningen in 1984, where he has worked ever since. He became a full professor in 1988 and was named the Jacobus H. van’t Hoff Distinguished Professor of Molecular Sciences in 2004. It was in 1999 that he created the first molecular motor , a light-driven rotating molecule that spins in one specific direction. In 2005 Feringa and his colleagues used their molecular motor to spin a 28-micrometer-long glass cylinder that was 10 000 times as big as the motor. Six years later they used four molecular motors as wheels to create a nanocar, smaller than the width of a human hair, which drove across a copper surface after receiving an electrical charge from a scanning tunneling microscope tip. Feringa’s research could have applications such as the creation of nanorobots that can be injected into the bloodstream to deliver drugs. For his work on the design and synthesis of such molecular machines, Feringa shared the 2016 Nobel with fellow researchers Jean-Pierre Sauvage and J. Fraser Stoddart. Feringa has also received numerous other awards, such as the 2004 Spinoza Prize, the highest scientific award in the Netherlands. (Photo credit: Wybe, CC BY-SA 4.0 )

Date in History: 18 May 1951