He is best known for founding the field of transition metal-boron multiple bonding (transition metal borylenes),[1][2][3][4] the synthesis of the first stable compounds containing boron-boron[5] and boron-oxygen[6] triple bonds, the isolation of the first non-carbon/nitrogen main-group dicarbonyl,[7] and the first fixation of dinitrogen at an element of the p-block of the periodic table.

[8] By modifying a strategy pioneered by Prof. Gregory Robinson of the University of Georgia, Braunschweig also discovered the first rational and high-yield synthesis of neutral compounds containing boron-boron double bonds (diborenes).

[11] Braunschweig obtained his Ph.D. and Habilitation from RWTH Aachen with P. Paetzold and worked as a postdoctoral researcher with Michael F. Lappert, FRS, at the University of Sussex, Brighton.

After two years at Imperial College London as Senior Lecturer and Reader he took up a Chair of Inorganic Chemistry at the Julius-Maximilians-University of Würzburg in 2002, and is now also the founding director of the Institute for Sustainable Chemistry & Catalysis with Boron (ICB).

He was also awarded the 2014 RSC Main Group Award,[7] the 2016 Alfred Stock Memorial Prize of the German Society of Chemists,[8] the 2021 RSC Mond-Nyholm Prize,[9] the 2024 ACS M. Frederick Hawthorne Award,[10] and the 2024 Eni Advanced Environmental Solutions Prize.