Frank C. Schroeder, Dr. rer. nat.

Professor, Boyce Thompson Institute
and Professor, Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, Cornell University

Graduate Fields:
Chemistry and Chemical Biology (CCB)
Biochemistry, Molecular & Cell Biology (BMCB)

Frank C. Schroeder hails from Hamburg, a large city and harbor in Northern Germany. He studied chemistry and physics at the University of Hamburg, where he worked with Prof. Wittko Francke, one of the leading chemical ecologists in Europe. Frank received his Doctorate in 1998 for studies of structures and functions of insect-derived natural products, which included the serendipitous discovery of a group of intriguing ant alkaloids, for example myrmicarin 663.

During his graduate studies, Frank developed a deep appreciation for NMR spectroscopy as a tool in organic chemistry. He continued to work on new ways for using NMR to better characterize biological small molecule samples as a postdoc and later research associate with Jerrold Meinwald at Cornell University. In 2004, he joined Jon Clardy's group at Harvard Medical School as the Director of the Natural Products Initiative, before joining the faculty at Cornell's Boyce Thompson Institute in August 2007.

As a student at the University of Hamburg, Frank spent most of his free time hiking and climbing in the Swiss and Austrian Alps. As a result of a failed expedition to the summit of Jungfrau in 1996, Frank co-owns a cabin in a remote location in the Italian Alps, where he spends most of his time away from the lab.

Frank teaches in the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology (Advanced Analytical Chemistry, CHEM6250). Click here for an introduction to research in the Schroeder lab.