The British Society of Flavorists is very pleased to welcome Professor Peter Schieberle as an Honorary Member.
Peter Schieberle was born on 14. September 1951 in Menden, Germany and studied at the universities of Bonn and Aachen. In 1980, he received his doctorate from the Technical University of Munich working on the mechanisms of lipid peroxidation. As part of his dissertation, he came into contact with the field of aroma research, as his doctoral supervisor, Professor Werner Grosch, was focusing primarily on the analysis and generation of volatile aroma compounds. Peter Schieberle was very inspired with the work of Professor Grosch and began to further explore this exciting field of food chemistry. He completed his postdoctoral term from 1980 to 1983 as a research assistant at the German Research Institute for Food Chemistry (DFA) in Garching, today's Leibniz Institute for Food Systems Biology (LSB). Between 1986 and 1990, Peter Schieberle was habilitated for work dealing with the formation of odorous substances in the Maillard reaction and gained a venia legendi at the Faculty of Chemistry of the Technical University of Munich. During this time, Peter Schieberle and Werner Grosch worked on improving gas chromatography-olfactometry technique, developing a new method: the Aroma Extract Dilution Analysis (AEDA). This has made it possible to categorize the so-called "key food odourants" (KFOs), volatile substances that significantly determine the flavour impression of a food. In 1987, Schieberle and Grosch also developed a method for the quantification of volatile aromatics: the Stable Isotope Dilution Analysis (SIDA), thus achieving another breakthrough in modern flavour research.
After this extremely innovative period in Garching, Peter Schieberle began teaching food chemistry at the Friedrich-Alexander University in Erlangen-Nuremberg from 1989 to 1993, and in 1993 he accepted the position of professor of food chemistry at the University of Wuppertal. However, he returned to Bavaria in 1995 because he was offered a position at the Chair of Food chemistry at the Technical University of Munich, and on August 1, 1995, he was appointed director of the DFA.
Together with Werner Grosch, Peter Schieberle is today considered one of the founders of modern flavour research, and under his leadership the DFA has built the highest national and international reputation in molecular sensory science until 2016. As director of the institute, Peter Schieberle has contributed to extremely innovative technological discoveries that have advanced flavour research. With the development of the so-called "Solvent Assisted Flavor Evaporation" (SAFE) in 1999, a team led by Peter Schieberle developed a robust evaporation system that can be used to isolate aroma compounds from complex food matrices (e.g. fat-based) without creating artifacts. SAFE technology has established itself in academic and industrial research laboratories around the world as one of the standard methods for aroma research. Professor Schieberle's team also looked at various options for automated analysis and quantification of KFOs through SPME/SIDA and GCxGC-TOF-MS/SIDA, respectively
The team of professor Schieberle brought into the focus of flavour science community the logic of Odour Activity Values (OAV). Hoffmann and Schieberle presented their „sensomics approach“ in 2011. The idea was to decode the chemical fingerprint of a given food (the Sensome), needed to cause a characteristic aroma perception in the brain by breaking it down into odorant/receptor responses followed by recombination of the aroma. The central part of sensomics is the OAV concept. This resulted in plethora of scientific articles, praised in flavour industry too, that systematically studied aroma of such foods as: apple, apricot, beer, bread, cheese, cocoa beans, cognac, durian, ginger, grapefruit, guava, hazelnut, honey, hop, liquorice, mango, meat, milk chocolate, mushroom, mustard seeds, oat pastry, olive oil, onion, orange, peanuts, pears, pineapple, popcorn, prawns, pretzels, pumpkin seed oil, rum, salami, sesame seed oil, tea, tomatoes, wine, whiskey, white pepper, yoghurt. Through his scientific work he has shown that the almost infinit variety of food flavours is composed of only about 230 key odorants of the 12,000 volatile aroma compounds identified so far.
Professor Schieberle initiated the expansion of the research profile of the DFA towards interdisciplinary questions at the interface of molecular aroma chemistry and human physiology, since scientific knowledge is growing that volatile and non-volatile aromas have other important physiological effects on the human body that go beyond purely sensory effects.
During his academic career, Peter Schieberle led doctoral studies with more than 100 young talents. His students include excellent world-renowned food chemists such as Thomas Hofmann, Andrea Büttner, Michael Granvogl and Michael Rychlik. Petr Schieberle's scientific achievements are reflected in more than 400 doctoral theses and scientific publications, and he has been the editor-in-chief of the acclaimed Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry of the American Chemical Society since 2002, he is currently part of its Honorary Advisory Board. Peter Schieberle is the co-author of the latest edition of the textbook "Food Chemistry", initiated by Belitz and Grosch and to which Peter Schieberle has contributed since 2001. This book is an internationally recognized standard textbook for food chemistry students and is also highly regarded as a useful reference book in the industry. Finally, the numerous scientific awards that Peter Schieberle has received for his scientific achievements also speak for his professional success.