Tobias Ritter is a German chemist. He serves as the Director of the Department of Organic Synthesis at the Max Planck Institute for Coal Research in Mülheim an der Ruhr.
Tobias was born in 1975 in Lübeck, Germany. He received his undergraduate education in Braunschweig, Germany, Bordeaux, France, Lausanne, Switzerland, and Stanford, US, and received a master of science from Braunschweig University in 1999. He has done undergraduate research with Prof. Barry M. Trost at Stanford, obtained his PhD working with Prof. Erick M. Carreira at ETH Zurich in 2004, and was a postdoc with Prof. Robert H. Grubbs at Caltech. In 2006, Tobias was appointed as Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Harvard and promoted to Associate Professor in 2010. In 2015, Ritter was appointed Director at the Max Planck Institute for Coal Research in Mülheim an der Ruhr. Additionally, in 2017, he was appointed as an honorary professor at RWTH Aachen University.
Research in the Ritter group focuses on the development of novel reaction chemistry. We seek to discover molecular structure and reactivity that can contribute to interdisciplinary solutions for challenges in science. The lab focuses on synthetic organic and organometallic chemistry, complex molecule synthesis, and mechanistic studies to develop practical access to molecules of interest in catalysis, medicine, and materials.