Peter H. Seeberger

Peter Seeberger, born in 1966, studied chemistry at the University of Erlangen-Nuernberg and received his PhD in biochemistry in 1995 as a Fulbright scholar at the University of Colorado in Boulder. After a postdoctoral stay at the Sloan Kettering Institute for Cancer Research in New York, he became an Assistant Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1998 and was promoted to Firmenich Associate Professor of Chemistry there in 2002. From 2003 he was Professor of Organic Chemistry in the Department of Chemistry and Applied Biosciences at ETH Zurich and Affiliate Professor at the Sanford-Burnham Institute in La Jolla, California. Since 2009 he has headed the 'Biomolecular Systems' department at the Max Planck Institute for Colloids and Interfaces in Potsdam, is a professor at the Free University of Berlin and since 2011 an honorary professor at the University of Potsdam. His group conducts research in the interface between chemistry and biology. In addition to groundbreaking inventions in the area of ​​the automatic synthesis of complex sugars, he develops new continuous synthesis methods for the total synthesis of active ingredients. In addition to biological work on the breakdown of signal transmission, research into the material properties of complex sugars is in the foreground. Basic research in immunology has contributed to the development of vaccines. Vaccines against hospital germs are now close to clinical development. Professor Seeberger’s research has been published in over 550 articles, four books, more than 50 patents and more than 200 conference abstracts and presented in over 850 lectures. Among the more than 35 prizes are the Stifterverband's Science Prize (2017), the Körber Prize of European Sciences (2007) and the Claude S. Huson Award of the American Chemical Society (2009). He has been an elected member of Berlin since 2013 -Brandenburg Academy of Sciences. Peter H. Seeberger is editor of the open access 'Beilstein Journal for Organic Chemistry' and is involved in more than ten other journals. As a co-founder of the Tesfa-Ilg 'Hope for Africa' Foundation, he is committed to improving living conditions in Ethiopia. Several successful companies in Germany, Switzerland and the USA have emerged from the work in the Seeberger laboratory.