Ulrich Schwaneberg
Ulrich Schwaneberg, born 17 June 1969 in Waiblingen, Germany, is a German chemist and protein engineer. He is the Chair of Biotechnology at RWTH Aachen University and serves on the scientific board of the Leibniz Institute for Interactive Materials in Aachen. He specializes in directed evolution of proteins for materials science and has developed methods to create and test large numbers of protein variants, including diversity-generation methods such as SeSaM, OmniChange, PLICing, cepPCR, and PePevo, as well as high-throughput screening systems like Fur-Shell. His group has revealed general enzyme design principles by studying libraries with full natural diversity and single amino acid changes, and developed KnowVolution to efficiently explore protein sequence space.
Schwaneberg studied chemistry at the University of Stuttgart, earning a diploma in 1996 and a PhD in technical biochemistry under R. D. Schmid. He did a postdoc at Caltech with Frances Arnold, became a professor at Jacobs University Bremen in 2002, and in 2009 was appointed head of the Institute of Biotechnology at RWTH Aachen University, with a 2010 co-appointment to the DWI Leibniz Institute for Interactive Materials. He has served on the Bioeconomy Science Center’s board of directors and as speaker of HICAST (Harbin Innovation Campus for Advanced and Sustainable Technologies) at RWTH Aachen. Schwaneberg co-founded SeSaM-Biotech GmbH in 2008 to provide directed evolution services and holds multiple patents for improved enzymes. He has received several honors, including visiting professorships in China (2013) and Japan (2015), the 2016 BMBF award for Next Generation of Biotechnological Processes, and the 2018 Innovation Award of BioRegions in Germany for plant health release technology.
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 03:13 (CET).