Sir Fraser Stoddart, FRS, FRSE, FRSC, ACSF
Board of Trustees Professor of Chemistry, Northwestern University
The academic career of Fraser Stoddart can be traced through thick and thin from the Athens of the North to the Windy City beside Lake Michigan with interludes on the edge of the Canadian Shield beside Lake Ontario, in the Socialist Republic of South Yorkshire, on the Plains of Cheshire beside the Wirral, in the Midlands of the Heartland of Albion, and in the City of the Angels beside the Peaceful Sea.
He has been a member of the faculty at Northwestern University since 2008. He is a Board of Trustees Professor and Director of the Center for the Chemistry of Integrated Systems. His research interests are in chemistry beyond the molecule, which, combined with his interest in templation, has led to the template-directed synthesis, based on molecular recognition and self-assembly processes, of a wide range of mechanically interlocked molecules, bistable variants of which have found their way in the form of switches into molecular electronic devices and drug delivery systems. In terms of molecular structure, his research straddles the size regime from the mesomolecular scale all the way up to the nanoscopic, microscopic and macroscopic levels: it includes wholly synthetic polymers and metal-organic frameworks. He also embraces radical chemistry in both the supramolecular and mechanostereochemical domains.
Ben L. Feringa
Jacobus van ‘t Hoff Distinguished Professor of Molecular Sciences, Stratingh Institute for Chemistry, University of Groningen
He obtained his PhD degree at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands
under the guidance of Professor Hans Wynberg. After working as a research scientist at
Shell in the Netherlands and the UK, he was appointed lecturer and in 1988 full professor
at the University of Groningen and named the Jacobus H. van ‘t Hoff Distinguished
Professor of Molecular Sciences in 2004. He was elected Foreign Honorary member of the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is a member of the Royal Netherlands
Academy of Sciences. In 2008 he was appointed Academy Professor and he was knighted
by Her Majesty the Queen of the Netherlands. Feringa’s research has been recognized
with numerous awards including the Körber European Science Award (2003), the Spinoza
Award (2004), the Prelog gold medal (2005), the Norrish Award of the ACS (2007), the
Paracelsus medal (2008), the Chirality medal (2009), the RSC Organic Stereochemistry
Award (2011), the Humboldt award (2012), the Nagoya gold medal (2013), the ACS
Cope Scholar Award (2015), the Chemistry for the Future Solvay Prize (2015), the
August-Wilhelm-von-Hoffman Medal (2016), The 2016 Nobel prize in Chemistry, the
Tetrahedron Prize (2017) and the European Chemistry Gold Medal (2018). In 2019 he
was elected as a member of the European Research Council.
Feringa’s research interest includes stereochemistry, organic synthesis, asymmetric
catalysis, molecular switches and motors, self-assembly, molecular nanosystems and
photopharmacology.
