In 1990, he completed a postdoctoral stint in the working group of John Michael Brown at the Dyson Perrins Laboratory for Organic Chemistry at the University of Oxford.
[2] He moved to the Max Planck Institute for Coal Research in Mülheim as head of the working group in the field of organic synthesis, where he took over the technical management at the beginning of 1998.
The focus is on the development and understanding of the mode of action of molecular catalysts, including detailed experimental and computer chemical studies of the mechanisms and structural-effect relationships in organometallic catalysis.
The use of carbon dioxide, both as a raw material at the interface between chemistry and energy, as well as a green solvent and transport medium for continuous chemical processes, accompanied his scientific career.
[2] In September 2019, Walter Leitner and researchers from Covestro AG (Christoph Gürtler and Berit Stange) were nominated for the German Future Prize with the project "CO2 – a raw material for sustainable plastics".