Feringa will not say what the lecture will be about. ‘It’s difficult to tell you what I’ll be talking about, because I don’t want to give it away’, he says. This has not diminished people’s interest in the lecture, however. On Wednesday at 4 p.m., the church will be chock-full.
‘The lecture is an initiative of the RUG’, says Deekens. ‘We want to show people who he is and what makes him so special. And who better to do that than the man himself?’ Dozens of university employees are working on organising the lecture, using the same schedule that is used for the opening of the academic year.
Ceremony
The ceremony, which will be in English, will be broadcast live on the RUG and UK websites starting Wednesday at 3:30 p.m. ‘This also serves as a dress rehearsal for Feringa for the lecture he’ll be delivering in Uppsala’, according to Deekens. It is tradition for every Nobel Prize winner to deliver a lecture in the week before the award ceremony, which takes place every year on 10 December.
On Wednesday, the Martini church will be full of invited guests, such as the University Board, faculty managers, and the mayor. There are 30 reserved spots for interested parties from outside the university. ‘But they have almost all been filled’, a spokesperson for Studium Generale says.
Feringa was awarded the Nobel Prize for chemistry in early October. He shares it with a Frenchman and a Briton. The professor built the first molecular motor in 1999, and in 2011 he built the first nano-car.