Nobel laureate joins calls to make EU research more global

Ben Feringa, who won the Nobel prize for chemistry in 2016, is setting up a lab in China and encouraging the EU to take a more global approach to research collaboration.

Feringa, whose Nobel prize-winning research was partially funded by the European Research Council, was granted residency rights in China last month. He will not be moving to China, but will help set up the Ben Feringa Centre in Shanghai as a joint project between the Netherlands’ University of Groningen, where he is based, and the East China University of Science and Technology.

“Research cooperation in Europe is important and there is still a lot to be done,” he told Research Europe. “But we should not forget that in Asia developments happen very quickly, and we should also cooperate with groups there.”