​​​Schoenebeck Research Group

Franziska Schoenebeck has been a Full Professor and Chair at the Institute of Organic Chemistry at RWTH Aachen University since the summer of 2016. Professor Schoenebeck was born and raised in Berlin, Germany. From 2001-2004, she studied Chemistry at the Technical University of Berlin and the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, UK. She undertook her PhD in synthetic organic chemistry in the group of Prof. John A. Murphy in Glasgow, UK. In 2008 she moved to California to work with Prof. K. N. Houk at UCLA, where she was involved in computational studies of organic reactivity. In 2010, she joined the faculty of the ETH Zürich to start her independent research program. Three years later, she was appointed Professor (W2) at the Institute of Organic Chemistry at RWTH Aachen University and promoted to Full Professor (W3) in 2016. Her research program is based at the interface of synthetic organic, mechanistic and computational chemistry with a strong emphasis in homogeneous metal catalysis. Her research has been recognized with several awards and lectureships, including the 2025 ACS EJ Corey Award, the 2024 Thieme-IUPAC Prize, the 2022 Tetrahedron Young Investigator Award and the 2020 Klung-Wilhelmy-Science Award. ​She serves the chemical community in various roles, including as Associate Editor at the ACS journal JACS.