Professor Uwe Bornscheuer is full professor at the University of Greifswald (Greifswald, Germany) at the Institute of Biochemistry and is head of the Dept. of Biotechnology & Enzyme Catalysis. He received his diploma degree in chemistry in 1990 and his Ph.D. degree in Technical Chemistry in 1993 both from the University of Hannover. In 1994 he performed postdoctoral studies at the University of Nagoya (Nagoya, Japan), then moved to the University of Stuttgart, where he finished his habilitation in Technical Biochemistry in 1998. He has been a professor in Greifswald since 1999. Uwe Bornscheuer has published over 550 peer-reviewed research articles, more than 40 book chapters and has filed >50 patent applications. He has received several awards including most recently the “2022 Enzyme Engineering Award”.

He is currently member of the Scientific Advisory Boards of the Toulouse White Biotechnology center and of the company Carbios (France) and he is a cofounder and Chairman of the Advisory Board of the company Enzymicals AG in Greifswald. He is currently head of the Senate of the University of Greifswald. He is also member of the review board for Biochemistry of the German Research Foundation (DFG) and of the Novo Nordisk Foundation. 

The major theme in the Bornscheuer group is identifying and optimizing enzymes through protein engineering for applications in organic synthesis (i.e., chiral intermediates for pharmaceuticals), lipid modification (healthy fats/oils, oleochemistry), the enzymatic degradation of complex marine polysaccharides and more recently enzymatic recycling of plastics such as PET. He has pioneered many methods of protein engineering, including a range of new high-throughput screening methods, computational tools to design libraries of protein variants and the application of these methods to alter the regio-, chemo- and stereoselectivity of enzymes for various applications.