Andreas Kirschning received his doctorate in chemistry from the University of Hamburg in 1989. After a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Washington (USA) from 1989 to 1990, he began independent scientific research and habilitated at the TU Clausthal in 1996. In 2000, he became a full professor at Leibniz University Hannover. He has been a visiting professor at various universities, including Madison (USA), Rennes, Le Mans, and Strasbourg (all France), Rome (Italy), and at IIT Indore (India). Since 2024, he has been co-affiliated with Uppsala University as a guest professor and will be the Tage Erlander Professor in Uppsala in 2027.

Kirschning's research is located in the field of natural product chemistry, with a particular focus on the search for new anti-infectives and anti-tumor active substances. In this context, his group pioneered the introduction of flow chemistry, an enabling technology, around 25 years ago.

In recent years, as a result of attending seminars in philosophy, he got interested in explorations on the origins of life and the question of chemical evolution, which must have preceded the biological evolution of life. Since then, he has published several papers, some of them in collaboration with philosophers.

At SCAS, Kirschning will continue theoretical work on chemical evolution. He plans to focus on the role of certain metals during the transition from abiotic to biotic evolution. This research will be carried out in collaboration with the Department of Earth Sciences at Uppsala University.

Andreas Kirschning is in residence in March 2026.
This information is accurate as of the academic year 2025-26.