Johann Gasteiger - Germany's Pioneer in Chemoinformatics

Johann Gasteigersknown to his colleagues and friends as “Johnny”swas born on October 27, 1941 in Dachau, Germany. Between 1961 and 1967, he studied chemistry at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University of Munich, at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH), and also at the University of Zurich (Switzerland). Johann graduated in Organic Chemistry under Professor Rolf Huisgen from the Ludwig-Maximilians-University of Munich and then in 1971 received his doctorate, specializing in “Mechanism of Reactions of Cyclo-octatetraene”. After a postdoctoral fellowship in quantum chemistry between 1971 and 1972 with Prof. Andrew Streitwieser, Jr. at the University of California in Berkeley (U.S.A.), investigating “ab initio Calculations on Carbanions“, Johnny returned to Germany and taught at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) until 1993. During this time, he worked together with Prof. I. Ugi as a scientific assistant and completed his habilitation in 1979, specializing in the area of “Chemical Reactions and Reactivity Models and Algorithms”. Johnny was appointed a Professor at the TUM in 1988.