Christoph Steinbeck was born in Neuwied, Germany, in 1966. He studied chemistry at the University of Bonn, where he received his diploma and doctoral degree in the workgroup of Prof. Eberhard Breitmaier at the Institute of Organic Chemistry. Focus of his Ph. D. thesis was the program LUCY for computer assisted structure elucidation. In 1996, he joined the group of Prof. Clemens Richert at Tufts University in Boston, MA, USA, where he worked in the area of biomolecular NMR on the 3D structure elucidation of peptide-nucleic acid conjugates. In 1997 Christoph Steinbeck became head of the Structural Chemo- and Bioinformatics Workgroup at the newly founded Max-Planck-Institute of Chemical Ecology in Jena, Germany. In fall 2002 he moved to Cologne University Bioinformatics Center (CUBIC) as head of the Research Group for Molecular Informatics. His research focuses on methods for Computer-Assisted Structure Elucidation in Metabolomics and Natural Products Research. In December 2003 Christoph Steinbeck received his Habilitation in Organic Chemistry from Friedrich-Schiller-University in Jena, Germany.
Christoph Steinbeck is past chairman of the Computers-Information-Chemistry (CIC) division of the German Chemical Society, past trustee of the Chemical Structure Association (CSA) Trust, a lifetime member of the World Association of Theoretically Oriented Chemists (WATOC) and member of various editorial boards and committees.
Today, Christoph is head of chemoinformatics and metabolism at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) in Hinxton, Cambridge, UK.
His group develops a number of the leading open source software packages in Chemo- and Bioinformatics, including the Chemistry Development Kit (CDK), a Java library for chemo- and bioinformatics, Bioclipse, an Eclipse-based Rich Client for everything and nothing in particular, and OrChem, a chemical database cartridge for the Oracle database system.
They further develop open chemistry databases for the biosciences, such as
- ChEBI, the dictionary and ontology of Chemical Entities of Biological Interest,
- IntEnz and Rhea, databases dealing with Enzyme nomenclature and biochemical reactions, and
- NMRShiftDB, an open content database for chemical structures and their NMR data.
The Steinbeck group’s research is dedicated to the elucidation of metabolomes by means of computer-assisted structure elucidation and other prediction methods.