CreInSol and Honorary Professor of the East China University of Science and Technology
Peter Maienfisch is the founder and owner of CreInSol MCB, a company formed in April 2020. Previously he was Research Portfolio Manager Insect Control & Seedcare at Syngenta Crop Protection AG in Switzerland (until April 2020). In this role he was responsible for defining the research strategies and to govern all insecticide, nematicide and seedcare research projects across technologies from their initiation to the delivery to development.
Furthermore, he works as Honorary Professor at the East China University of Science and Technology (ECUST), Shanghai, China, as Part-time Professor at Central China Normal University (CCNU), Wuhan, China and as lecturer at the University of Basel, Switzerland.
Peter Maienfisch studied chemistry at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zürich, Switzerland, where he received his PhD in 1983. Afterwards he spent 2 years at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech; Pasadena, CA, USA) to perform post-doctoral research in the group of Prof. Robert E. Ireland.
During his career he held several different leadership positions in Crop Protection R&D including Group Leader Insecticide Chemistry, Analytics & Automation at Syngenta, Head of Chemistry in Crop Protection Research at Novartis and Group Leader in Insecticide Research at Ciba.
His track record of innovation and successful introduction of new technologies includes authorship of more than 250 scientific papers and patents. He is the inventor of thiamethoxam (Actara®, Cruiser®, one of the leading insecticides world-wide with annual sales of more than 1 billion $) and championed the development of this innovative insecticide. Furthermore, he initiated research on many new chemical classes at Syngenta and made essential contributions to the discovery and optimization of several new active ingredients, such as Spiropidion, Isocycloseram, Cyclobutrifluram and a malaria vector control compound, which are expected to reach the market in the next couple of years. His scientific contributions also led to many invitations as a speaker and co-organizer of many international congresses, including IUPAC Crop Protection congresses. Furthermore, he is Editor of two books on the “Discovery and optimization of modern Crop Protection Products”