His maternal great-uncle was the prominent German financier and economist Hjalmar Schacht, sometime President of the Reichsbank and cabinet minister in Nazi Germany.
[2] Doering was an undergraduate at Harvard University, where he took courses with some of the leading organic chemists at the time, including Louis Fieser and Paul Doughty Bartlett.
He stayed at Harvard for his graduate education, where he studied catalytic hydrogenation under Reginald Linstead,[3] completing his PhD in 1943.
Subsequently, during an independent career at Columbia, Yale, and Harvard that spanned over half a century, he made numerous contributions to the field of physical organic chemistry.
He first articulated the notion that cyclic systems with (4n + 2) π-electrons exhibit aromatic stability (the modern form of Hückel's rule)[7] and coined the term "carbene" in collaboration with Woodward and Winstein during a nocturnal cab ride in Chicago.