Curriculum Vitae

Peter H. Seeberger, born in 1966, studied chemistry at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany and completed a PhD in biochemistry in Boulder (USA). After performing research at the Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center Research in New York he built an independent research program at MIT where he was promoted to Firmenich Associate Professor of Chemistry with tenure. After six years as Professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) Zurich he assumed positions as Director at the Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces in Potsdam and Professor at the Free University of Berlin in 2009. In addition he serves as honorary Professor at the University of Potsdam. Since 2021, he is a Vice President of the German Research Foundation (DFG) the main funding body in Germany. He is a member of the governing body of the Max-Planck Society (“Senate”) and the Veterinary University (TiHo) Hannover (“Stiftungsrat”).

Professor Seeberger’s research on the chemistry and biology of carbohydrates, carbohydrate vaccine development and continuous flow synthesis of drug substances spans a broad range of topics from engineering to immunology and has been documented in over 650 peer-reviewed journal articles, four books, more than 50 patents, over 200 published abstracts and more than 950 invited lectures. This work was recognized with more than 40 international awards from the US (e.g. Arthur C. Cope Young Scholar Award, Horace B. Isbell Award, Claude S. Hudson Award from the American Chemical Society), Germany (e.g. 2017 Stifterverband Science Prize, Körber Prize for European Sciences), Holland (Havinga Medal), Israel (Honorary Lifetime Member Israel Chemical Society), Japan (Yoshimasa Hirata Gold Medal), Switzerland (“The 100 Most Important Swiss”), the Czech Republic (honorary doctoral degree UCT) and international organizations (Whistler Award 2012, Int. Carboh. Soc.). In 2013 he was elected to the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences.

Peter H. Seeberger served the scientific community in many functions. He greatly supports the idea of open access publishing as the Editor-in-Chief of the Beilstein Journal of Organic Chemistry and serves on the editorial advisory boards of many other journals. Through his work in the area of neglected diseases, Peter Seeberger has become involved in philanthropic causes. He is a co-founder of the Tesfa-Ilg “Hope for Africa” Foundation in Ethopia that aims at improving health care in Ethiopia that recently helped to build a bed-net factory and established an IT training center.

The research in the Seeberger laboratory has given rise to several companies in the USA, Switzerland and Germany.

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