From 1992 to 1995 he studied chemistry at the Free University of Berlin and completed his diploma under Johann Mulzer, whom he followed to Frankfurt and subsequently Vienna as an assistant.
[1] From 1998 to 2000 he was a postdoc under Samuel J. Danishefsky at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City.
From 2017 to 2022, he was the Janice Cutler Chair in Chemistry at New York University and adjunct professor of neuroscience at NYU Grossman School of Medicine.
[4][5][6] His view is that many biologically active substances even of low molecular weight have not yet been discovered, and he has directed his research group to perform the total synthesis of such compounds.
Continuing his pioneering work in photopharmacology, his research group is developing chemical tools that are useful in neuroscience and cell biology but also hold promise as precision therapeutics, controlling the activity and presence of biologically active substances using light.