Peter R. Wich is Senior Lecturer in the School of Chemical Engineering at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Sydney, Australia. He is a member of the Centre for Advanced Macromolecular Design (CAMD) and the Australian Center for Nanomedicine (ACN).
In 2009, Peter received his PhD in Organic Chemistry at the University of Würzburg (Germany). Following this, he was an Alexander von Humboldt Postdoc Fellow at the University of California Berkeley (USA). In 2012, he returned to Germany and was appointed as Assistant Professor of Medicinal and Pharmaceutical Chemistry at the University of Mainz.
Since 2018, Peter leads the UNSW Research Lab for Functional Biopolymers. His primary research interests are in the fields of macromolecular chemistry at the interface between nanotechnology and bioorganic chemistry. Peter’s lab focuses on the chemical modification of natural biopolymers with the aim to engineer new multifunctional and biocompatible materials for applications in drug delivery, nanomedicine and bio-catalysis.
Peter has been awarded more than 20 prizes and scholarships for his research, including the Innovation Prize in Medicinal/Pharmaceutical Chemistry for his work on bioinspired nanomaterials (jointly awarded by the Awarded by the German Chemical and the German Pharmaceutical Society) and the Galenus Technology Prize, for his innovative achievements in the field of Pharmaceutical Technology. In 2016, he was selected as “young member” of the Academy of Sciences and Literature in Mainz, Germany.
He is also a passionate teacher and is heavily involved in outreach activities to promote chemistry to a broader audience. Peter coauthored a German textbook for Organic Chemistry, a standard reference in its field. He is the founder of the largest online portal for chemical experiments, demonstrations and teaching resources in the German-speaking area. He and his team also had several TV appearances as science experts in popular German TV edutainment shows.
