The Dutch way of dealing with private parking for Nobel Prize winners

At universities around the world, Nobel Laureates have their own parking facilities. Since Professor Ben Feringa has won a Nobel Prize in Chemistry (October 2016), we decided it was time he had his own parking space too. There is only one problem ... the Professor usually cycles to work at the University of Groningen campus. Since Thursday 23 August 2017, Ben Feringa can park his bike in a special bicycle rack for Nobel Laureates at the Faculty of Science and Engineering.

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.