Peter Wasserscheid is head of the Institute of Chemical Reaction Engineering at the Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nuremberg (FAU) and director of the Helmholtz Institute Erlangen-Nuremberg for Renewable Energy, a part of Forschungszentrum Jülich. Peter studied chemistry at the RWTH Aachen and finished his PhD in 1998. After a six-month industrial postdoc with BP Chemicals in Sunbury (UK) he returned to the RWTH Aachen where he completed his habilitation in 2002. In 2003, Wasserscheid took up his current position at the FAU, the director position for the Helmholtz Institute added in 2014 to his duties.
The key research interests of the Wasserscheid research group centre on catalyst material development and reaction engineering aspects of multiphase catalytic processes. Worldwide, the team belongs to the top research teams in developing chemical hydrogen storage using Liquid Organic Hydrogen Carrier (LOHC) systems. The group develops this technology for stationary and mobile applications. These efforts include catalyst and reactor developments, systems design and engineering as well as the development of larger scale demonstrators.
His research efforts have earned him a number of awards including the Leibniz Award of the German Science Foundation and two Advanced Investigator Grants of the European Research Council in 2010 and 2018.