Automated Carbohydrate Synthesis

After earning his Ph.D. in biochemistry under the guidance of Marvin H. Caruthers in 1995 Professor Seeberger did postdoctoral research with Samuel J. Danishefsky. He began his independent career at the MIT in 1998 and was promoted to Firmenich Associate Professor of Chemistry in 2002. In 2003 he assumed a position as Professor for Organic Chemistry at the ETH and a position as Affiliate Professor at the Burnham Institute in La Jolla, CA. His research interests focus on the interface of chemistry and biology and in particular on the role of complex carbohydrates and glycoconjugates in information transfer in biological systems. His group has developed new methods for the automated solid-phase synthesis of complex carbohydrates and glycosaminoglycans that serve as molecular tools.
Among other awards he received the Technology Review Top 100 Young Innovator Award (1999), Edgerton Award (2002), an Arthur C. Cope Young Scholar Award from the ACS (2003), the Horace B. Isbell Award from the ACS (2003) and the Otto-Klung Weberbank Prize (2004).


Daniel B. Werz (born 1975) studied chemistry at the University of Heidelberg, Germany, and at the University of Bristol, UK, with a fellowship of the Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes. In 2000 he received his diploma from University of Heidelberg where he also earned his Ph.D. in physical organic chemistry under the guidance of Rolf Gleiter. In 2004 he moved as a Feodor Lynen postdoctoral fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (AvH) to Peter Seeberger's group at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zürich, Switzerland, where his research interests focused on the total synthesis of oligosaccharides by solution- and solid-phase methods. Since 2006 he works as an Emmy Noether junior research group leader in the field of synthetic carbohydrate chemistry at the University of Göttingen, Germany. Among several fellowships he received the Ruprecht Karls Award of the University of Heidelberg and the Klaus Grohe Award of the German Chemical Society.