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. Starting in 2003, he was a professor of organic chemistry at ETH Zurich.
Since 2009, he has headed the “Biomolecular Systems” department at the Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces in Potsdam, is a professor at Freie Universität Berlin, and, since 2011, has been an honorary professor at the University of Potsdam. Since 2021, he is a Vice President of the German Research Foundation (DFG). He is a member of the governing body of the Max-Planck Society (“Senate”) and the Veterinary University (TiHo) Hannover (“Stiftungsrat”).
In 2023, he also began establishing the “Center for the Transformation of Chemistry (CTC)”, a new large-scale research center for which he secured 1.2 billion in funding and which is currently being built in Delitzsch (Saxony) and Merseburg (Saxony-Anhalt). Peter Seeberger is the scientific director of the CTC.
His research group works at the intersection of chemistry and biology. Groundbreaking discoveries in the field of glycosylation reactions have enabled the automated synthesis of complex sugars, which serve as the foundation for molecular glycobiology. New continuous synthesis methods that he developed starting in 2001 for the total synthesis of active pharmaceutical ingredients are now widely used in the pharmaceutical industry. In addition to biological research aimed at elucidating signal transduction, his work focuses on investigating the material properties of complex sugars. Basic research in the field of immunology has led to the development of vaccines against hospital-acquired pathogens, which are currently in clinical development. Antibodies targeting sugars on the cell surface of cancer cells are being developed as cancer therapeutics.
Professor Seeberger’s research has been published in over 740 peer-reviewed journal articles, five books, and more than 60 patents, and presented in over 1,100 invited lectures. His work has been recognized with more than 40 awards, including the Liebig Medal from the GDCh (2026), the Khorana Prize from the RSC (2024), the ACS Award for Affordable Green Chemistry (2021), the Stifterverband Science Prize (2017), the Claude S. Huson Award from the American Chemical Society (2009), and the Körber Prize for European Sciences (2007). He is a member of the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina and the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities, as well as a corresponding member of the Saxon Academy of Sciences. In 2022, he received an honorary doctorate from UCT in Prague.
Peter H. Seeberger is the editor of the diamond open-access journal *Beilstein Journal for Organic Chemistry*. Several successful companies have emerged from the research conducted in the Seeberger lab.