Peter Seeberger studied chemistry at the University of Erlangen, Germany, and in 1995 he completed his PhD in biochemistry in Boulder, in the USA.
From 1995 to 1997 he worked at the Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center Research in New York, and in 1998 he started an independent research program at MIT, where he was promoted to Firmenich Associate Professor of Chemistry with tenure.
In 2003 he moved for six years to the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) Zurich for the chemistry professor position.
In 2009 he assumed positions of Director at the Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces in Potsdam and Professor at the Free University of Berlin.
Since 2021, he has been the Vice President of the German Research Foundation (DFG).
The research topics of Professor Seeberger spans an impressively broad range, from engineering to immunology, with the main orientation on the chemistry and biology of carbohydrates, carbohydrate vaccine development, and synthesis of drug substances.
His outstanding research has been so far summarized in 600 articles published in prestigious journals, including Science or Nature, in five books, more than 50 patents, and more than 850 invited lectures, including Tony Holý Lecture given in 2017, focused on Automated Glycan Assembly: Basis for Vaccines, Diagnostics and Material Science.
His work was recognized with more than 50 international awards, including Award from the American Chemical Society, Emil-Fischer-Medaille from German Chemical Society and many others from Holland, Israel, Japan, Switzerland and other international organizations.
In 2013 he was elected to the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences.
The ways through which Peter Seeberger serves the scientific community and creates value for society are many: As the Editor-in-Chief of the Beilstein Journal of Organic Chemistry, he greatly supports the idea of open-access publishing; and he serves on the editorial advisory boards of many other journals. The research in the Seeberger laboratory has given rise to several spin-off pharmaceutical and medicinal chemistry companies in the USA, Switzerland, and Germany.
His work on neglected diseases led Peter Seeberger to philanthropic activities. He is a co-founder of the Tesfa-ILG “Hope for Africa” Foundation, which aims to improve health care and education in Ethiopia, and recently helped build an insecticide-treated bed-net factory and established an IT training center.
He advises many talented Czech students, who learn in his laboratories and continue to collaborate with him, for example by the establishment of a Czech-German partner group between UCT Prague and the Department of Biomolecular Systems, Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces.
Peter Seeberger is a renaissance person with ambitious visions, which he puts into practice. He is a person who serves human civilization as a scientist, educator, entrepreneur, and active citizen.