Schöning earned his Ph.D. from the University of Stuttgart in 1981, under the supervision of Wolfram Schwabhäuser.
[1] He was a professor in the Institute for Theoretical Informatics at the University of Ulm until his retirement in 2021.
[2] Schöning introduced the low and high hierarchies to structural complexity theory in 1983.
In a 1999 FOCS paper, Schöning showed that WalkSAT, a randomized algorithm previously analyzed for 2-satisfiability by Papadimitriou, had good expected time complexity (although still exponential) when applied to worst-case instances of 3-satisfiability and other NP-complete constraint satisfaction problems.
Schöning is also the inventor of the pedagogical programming languages LOOP, GOTO, and WHILE, which he described in his textbook Theoretische Informatik - kurz gefasst.