Mach-5: Sauvage-Stoddart-Feringa Awards

The miniaturization of electronic and magnetic devices has reshaped modern society. By shrinking components to the micro- and nanoscale, we unlocked revolutionary advances in information processing, data storage, and communication. Entire industries, and the digital world as we know it, are built on this progress.

A comparable transformation is now emerging at the molecular scale.

Over the past three decades, researchers have demonstrated that the fundamental principles of machines, including motion, switching, and energy conversion, can be implemented within single molecules and supramolecular systems. Molecular machines are no longer conceptual curiosities. They represent a rapidly advancing frontier in functional materials and nanotechnology.

When intelligently integrated with their environment, molecular devices can enable adaptive materials, controllable nanoscale systems, and entirely new technological solutions in areas ranging from smart materials to medicine.

The importance and maturity of this field were recognized with the 2016 Nobel Prize in Chemistry awarded to Jean-Pierre Sauvage, Sir Fraser Stoddart, and Ben Feringa for the design and synthesis of molecular machines.

The SSF Award is driven by this vision: to support pioneering research that advances functional systems to the smallest possible scale and helps shape the next generation of transformative technologies.

The Sauvage-Stoddart-Feringa (SSF) Prizes are awarded every two years, in coincidence with the Mach-5 conference, and consist of one senior and one junior prize. Candidates need to be nominated by individual researchers or research institutions with consolidated reputation in the field of molecular machines and related disciplines, and the winners are selected by a panel of international experts. The senior prize is awarded to accomplished researchers who have made outstanding contributions to shape the field of artificial molecular machines with the design, synthesis and investigation of novel systems. The junior prize is reserved to young scientists (under 40 years old and less than 12 years from the PhD title), not holding a permanent position, who have made original outstanding contributions to the design, synthesis and study of artificial molecular machines. Both awardees are invited to deliver a lecture at the Mach-5 conference.

• SSF Senior Prize: Nathalie Katsonis, University of Groningen, The Netherlands
• SSF Junior Prize: Yunyan Qiu, National University of Singapore

• SSF Senior Prize: Vincenzo Balzani, Emeritus Professor, Alma Mater Studiorum - Università di Bologna, Italy
• SSF Junior Prize: Víctor García-López, Assistant Professor, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, USA