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Peter R. Schreiner

Schreiner

Born November 17, 1965 in Nuremberg, Germany.

Liebig-Chair and Professor of Organic Chemistry, Institute of Organic Chemistry, Justus Liebig University, Giessen, Germany.

Email:prs@uni-giessen.de
WWW: external link

Peter R. Schreiner studied chemistry in his native city at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany, where he received his Dr. rer. nat. (1994) in Organic Chemistry. Simultaneously, he obtained a PhD (1995) in Computational Chemistry from the University of Georgia, USA. He completed his habilitation (assistant professorship) at the University of Göttingen (1999), before becoming associate professor at the University of Georgia (Athens, USA), and head of the institute in Giessen in 2002. P. R. Schreiner is an elected member and senator of the Leopoldina – German National Academy of Sciences, the North Rhine-Westphalian Academy of Sciences, Humanities, and the Arts, the Academy of Science and Literature (Mainz), and the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences. He received the Dirac Medal (2003), the Adolf-von-Baeyer Memorial Award of the German Chemical Society in 2017, the RSC Award in Physical Organic Chemistry of the RSC in 2019, the Academy Award of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Science in 2020, the ACS Arthur C. Cope Scholar Award 2021, the 2024 Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Award of the German Research Council (DFG), and the 2025 Schrödinger Medal. He has been a visiting professor at the CNRS in Bordeaux, the Technion in Haifa, the Australian National University in Canberra, and the University of Florida in Gainesville.

Author of:

More than 500 scientific articles, 1 book, 20 book chapters, 13 patents, and many contributions to popular science and science policy.

Important Contributions:

  • Development of the concept of tunneling control of chemical reactions: Established quantum mechanical tunneling (QMT) as a general and predictive principle in organic reaction dynamics, showing that chemical selectivity can be governed by QMT rather than by conventional kinetic or thermodynamic control. His studies on hydroxycarbenes and related reactive intermediates revealed unexpected low-temperature reaction pathways and introduced “tunneling control” as the third reactivity paradigm next to kinetic and thermodynamic control.
  • Pioneering work on reactive intermediates and organic reaction dynamics: Combined high-level quantum chemical calculations with matrix-isolation spectroscopy and mechanistic experiments to identify and characterize elusive reactive intermediates, including carbenes, and to understand their structures, lifetimes, and rearrangement mechanisms. Preparation of the first nitrogen allotrope beyond N2, namely hexanitrogen (N6) in 2025.
  • Recognition of London dispersion as a decisive force in molecular chemistry: Fundamental contributions and modern reassessment of London dispersion (LD) interactions in (organic) chemistry, demonstrating that LD can dominate molecular structure, stability, reactivity, and especially catalysis. LD should therefore be treated as a powerful design element for catalysis.
  • Development of diamondoid chemistry and molecular nanodiamonds: Advanced the synthesis, functionalization, and understanding of diamondoids as precisely defined diamond-like carbon nanostructures, using them to probe dispersion interactions and as building blocks for molecular materials and nanoscience.
  • Contributions to organocatalysis and hydrogen-bond catalysis: Made influential contributions to (thio)urea-based organocatalysis (starting 1997) by connecting concepts from anion recognition, hydrogen bonding, and physical organic chemistry to catalyst design and mechanism. The “Schreiner-Catalyst” is commercially available and is ubiquitously used in academic and industrial labs.