Per Olof Syrén

I am Professor and Chair of Organic Chemistry at the Department of Molecular Sciences, SLU, since 2026.

My research combines chemistry, biotechnology, and protein engineering for new paradigms in synthetic chemistry. During my MSc studies, I spent one year at the University of California, Berkeley, in the laboratory of Prof. Jack F. Kirsch, followed by an industrial MSc thesis project at AstraZeneca. I obtained my PhD in Biotechnology from KTH Royal Institute of Technology in 2011. Subsequently, I conducted postdoctoral research at the University of Stuttgart as an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow before returning to Sweden and KTH to establish my independent research group. I was appointed Associate Professor at KTH in 2016 in Chemistry for Life Sciences and promoted to full Professor at KTH in 2025.

In 2019, I received a competence development award from H.M. King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden and the Gunnar Sundblad Research Foundation in recognition of my pioneering research on polymer retrobiosynthesis. I showed how unprecedented sustainable materials could be designed and made from underutilized terpene-derived biomass by oxidative biochemistries through extending biocatalytic retrosynthesis to the material world. This was followed by an ascending research leader award from the Novo Nordisk Foundation in 2025 which gives me the possibility to fulfill my dream: designing enzymes and proteins from scratch.

At SLU, my ambition is to strengthen interdisciplinary research and education in green organic chemistry, bringing together expertise in molecular synthesis, natural products chemistry, metabolomics, NMR spectroscopy, and protein design to address challenges in sustainable chemistry and biotechnology, such as tackling the plastic problem and finding new ways to upcycle renewable synthons from biomass to added-value molecules under mild reaction conditions.

My research focuses on bridging organic chemistry with biotechnology to develop new catalytic concepts. My research has for instance developed chemoenzymatic cascade depolymerization of plastics (Commun. Chem. 2025) in which non-selective chemistry is integrated with selective enzyme catalysis to enable valorization of post-consumer polymer waste. A key interest is understanding, designing, and engineering enzymes for new-to-nature chemical transformations and I am particularly interested in mild activation methods such as microwaves and light to drive catalysis. A central research direction is protein and enzyme design, where my research investigates how protein structure, conformational dynamics, and electrostatic effects govern catalytic activity and selectivity. By combining experimental enzymology with molecular simulations, evolutionary approaches, and artificial intelligence, I seek to engineer enzymes with improved properties and develop catalysts capable of performing new-to-nature chemical reactions that could transform the chemical industry towards sustainable manufacturing.

Another major focus is sustainable polymer chemistry and circular materials and the development of biocatalytic strategies to convert renewable feedstocks into valuable chemical building blocks, including bio-based monomers derived from underutilized biomass such as terpenes. We also investigate chemoenzymatic approaches for plastic depolymerization and the recovery of valuable components from polymer waste at end-of-life. 

Our research further explores natural product chemistry and biocatalytic synthesis, including the engineering of terpene synthases and other enzymes to access structurally complex molecular scaffolds and advanced functional materials.

At SLU, we aim to establish new interdisciplinary research directions connecting protein design with organic synthesis, NMR spectroscopy, and metabolomics, enabling the discovery, characterization, and sustainable production of molecules with tailored properties and biological functions.