Dieter Seebach

Dieter Seebach ( born October 31, 1937 in Karlsruhe ) is a German chemist.

Life

Seebach studied chemistry at the Technical University of Karlsruhe, where he became a PhD in 1964 with a thesis on peroxides of 2,5 - dihydrofuran. He then spent two years at Harvard University during the later Nobel laureate Elias James Corey. In 1969 he returned to Karlsruhe and habilitated with a thesis for the detection of free bis (arylthio ) carbenes in solution and selenium - stabilized carbanions. In 1971 he was appointed to the Justus Liebig University in Giessen; In 1977 he moved to a professorship for Organic Chemistry at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology ( ETH) Zurich. In 2003 he became Professor Emeritus.

He was a visiting professor at the Universities of Madison (Wisconsin ), Strasbourg, Munich ( TU), Kaiserslautern, Frankfurt am Main and at Caltech, Pasadena, as well as at the former Max Planck Institute for Bioinorganic Chemistry in Mülheim an der Ruhr.

Work

His work focuses on the development of new synthetic methods, the preparation and structure analysis of β - peptides; the synthesis of oligomers in the (R )-3- hydroxybutyric acid and the respective biopolymers as well as their possible applications; The synthesis of optically active dendrimers and the use of the optically active titanate in organic synthesis. He is also known for his development of the concept of polarity reversal, as realized in the Corey -Seebach reaction.

Dieter Seebach is a member of the New Swiss Chemical Society and similar organizations in Germany, Great Britain, Japan and the United States. He is a member of the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina and the Academy of Sciences and Literature in Mainz.

In 2004 he received the Ryoji Noyori Prize and the 1999 Roger Adams Award, 2003 August- Wilhelm -von- Hofmann Medal and in 1987 the Karl Ziegler Prize. In 2007 he was one of the Thomson Reuters Citation Laureates.