He was awarded the 2016 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, together with Sir J. Fraser Stoddart and Jean-Pierre Sauvage, "for the design and synthesis of molecular machines".

[9] Following a short period at Shell in the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, he was appointed as lecturer at the University of Groningen in 1984 and Full Professor, succeeding Prof Wijnberg, in 1988.

[12] Ben Feringa holds over 30 patents and has published over 650 peer reviewed research papers to date, cited more than 30,000 times and has an h-index in excess of 90.

Interfacing molecular motors with the macroscopic world by surface assembly on gold nanoparticles[27] and a macroscopic gold film,[28] has shown that the motor functions while chemically bound to a surface, a key result for future nanomachines such as a molecular conveyor belt.

In 2011, molecular ‘nanocar’,[12] a molecule that contains molecular motor-based wheels and was shown to move on a solid surface upon subjection to electric current from an STM tip, was highlighted in international daily newspapers & magazines worldwide and selected by the Chinese Academy of Sciences as one of the 10 major discoveries in sciences worldwide.

[citation needed] Towards the future discipline of Systems chemistry, the development of a multistage chiral catalysts [30] which comprises an integrated supramolecular system that brings together molecular recognition, chirality transfer, catalysis, stereoelectronic control and enantio-selectivity while all these processes can be enabled or disabled via an internal motor function, moves the design and application of molecular motors to a whole new level of sophistication.

[31] As phosphoramidites found use in industry, recently they utilised them as starting reagents for asymmetric C-P bond formation.

As BINOL-containing phosphoramidites have the properties of an intrinsic chiral ligand and simultaneously can serve as a substrate, they hypothesized that they would increase stereoselectivity in C–P coupling processes with aryl compounds, and were delighted when that data confirmed that they did.

[32] Moreover, many other highlighted works are chiral electromagnetic radiation to generate enantioselectivity, low molecular weight gelators, imaging porphyrins with STM, drying induced self-assembly, organic synthesis, CD spectroscopy, asymmetric catalysis, exploring the origins of chirality including the possibility of an extraterrestrial source and various aspects of surface science including surface modification, surface energy control, and porphyrin allayers.

Feringa's contributions to the molecular sciences have been recognized with the Arthur C. Cope Scholar Award, the Nagoya Medal of Organic Chemistry,[41] the 2012 Grand Prix Scientifique Cino del Duca,[42] and the Humboldt award of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in 2012, Germany.

"[45] On 20 December 2016, Feringa jointly received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, together with Sir J. Fraser Stoddart and Jean-Pierre Sauvage, for their work on molecular machines.

In 2019, Feringa accepted the Raman Chair of the Indian Academy of Sciences, an honorary position whereby eminent scientists are invited to lecture on their work and interact with the research community in India.

[56] On 2 April 2019, Ben Feringa was conferred an honorary doctoral degree by the University of Johannesburg in recognition of his contributions to the Chemistry field and Scientific community as a whole.

[61] Feringa is a co-founder of the contract research company Selact (now a part of Kiadis), which was originally established to provide services in the area of organic synthesis but later developed high throughput screening methods.