Peter Seeberger

Director at the Max-Planck Institute and Professor at the Free University of Berlin

Peter H. Seeberger received his Vordiplom in 1989 from the Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, where he studied chemistry as a Bavarian government fellow. In 1990 he moved as a Fulbright scholar to the University of Colorado where he earned his Ph.D. in biochemistry under the guidance of Marvin H. Caruthers in 1995. After a postdoctoral fellowship with Samuel J. Danishefsky at the Sloan-Kettering Institute for Cancer Research in New York City he became Assistant Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in January 1998 and was promoted to Firmenich Associate Professor of Chemistry with tenure in 2002. From June 2003 until January 2009 held the position of Professor for Organic Chemistry at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich, Switzerland where he served as chair of the laboratory in 2008. In 2009 he assumed positions as Director at the Max-Planck Institute for Colloids and Surfaces in Potsdam and Professor at the Free University of Berlin. Since 2003 he serves as an Affiliate Professor at the Burnham Institute in La Jolla, CA.

Professor Seeberger’s research has been documented in over 200 articles in peer-reviewed journals, two books, fifteen issued patents and patent applications, more than 100 published abstracts and more than 430 invited lectures. Among other awards he received the Arthur C. Cope Young Scholar and Horace B. Isbell Awards from the American Chemical Society (2003) and the Otto-Klung Weberbank Prize for Chemistry (2004). In 2007 he received the Havinga Medal, the Yoshimasa Hirata Gold Medal and the Körber Prize for European Sciences. In 2007 and 2008 he was selected among “The 100 Most Important Swiss” by the magazine ”Schweizer Illustrierte”. In 2008 he received the UCB-Ehrlich Award for Excellence in Medicinal Chemistry and in 2009 the Claude S. Hudson Award for Carbohydrate Chemistry from the American Chemical Society.

Peter H. Seeberger is the Editor of the Journal of Carbohydrate Chemistry and serves on the editorial advisory boards of eleven other journals. He is a founding member of the board of the Tesfa-Ilg “Hope for Africa” Foundation that aims at improving health care in Ethiopia in particular by providing access to malaria vaccines and HIV treatments. He is a consultant and serves on the scientific advisory board of several companies. In 2006 he served as president of the Swiss Academy of Natural Sciences.

The research in professor Seeberger’s laboratory has resulted in two spin-off companies: Ancora Pharmaceuticals (founded in 2002, Medford, USA) that is currently developing a promising malaria vaccine candidate in late preclinical trials as well as several other therapeutics based on carbohydrates and i2chem that is commercializing microreactors for chemical applications.