Prof Thomas Wirth is professor of organic chemistry at Cardiff University. After studying chemistry in Bonn/Germany and at the Technical University of Berlin/Germany, he obtained his PhD in 1992 with Professor S. Blechert. After a postdoctoral stay with Professor K. Fuji at Kyoto University a JSPS fellow, he started his independent research at the University of Basel/Switzerland. In the group of Professor B. Giese he obtained his habilitation on stereoselective oxidation reactions supported by various scholarships before taking up his current position at Cardiff University in 2000. He was invited as a visiting professor to a number of places including the University of Toronto/Canada (1999), Chuo University in Tokyo, Osaka University, Osaka Prefecture University and with a JSPS fellowship to Kyoto University (2012). He was awarded the Werner-Prize from the New Swiss Chemical Society (2000), the Furusato award from JSPS London (2013) and recently the Wolfson Research Merit Award from the Royal Society and the Bader Award from the Royal Society of Chemistry (2016). In 2016 he was elected as a fellow of The Learned Society of Wales. His main interests of research concern stereoselective electrophilic reactions, oxidative transformations with hypervalent iodine reagents including mechanistic investigations and organic synthesis performed in microreactors.