Hokkaido University , or Hokudai (北大), is a public research university in Sapporo, Hokkaido, Japan. Founded in 1918, it is the fifth-oldest government-authorised university in Japan and one of the former Imperial Universities.

Benjamin List is a German chemist who is one of the directors of the Max Planck Institute for Coal Research and professor of organic chemistry at the University of Cologne. He co-developed organocatalysis, a method of accelerating chemical reactions and making them more efficient. He shared the 2021 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with David MacMillan "for the development of asymmetric organocatalysis".