Steinbeck's research interests have involved the elucidation of chemical structures of
metabolites. He was one of the first chemists to develop
open source tools for cheminformatics. He initiated
JChemPaint, was founder of the
Chemistry Development Kit, and is responsible for leading the team working on
Chemical Entities of Biological Interest (ChEBI). He headed the Cheminformatics and
Metabolomics group at the
European Molecular Biology Laboratory-European Bioinformatics Institute in
Cambridge, United Kingdom from 2008 to 2016. He became a professor for analytical chemistry, cheminformatics and chemometrics at the Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena in Thuringia, Germany in March 2017. Since 2020, Steinbeck is leading the German National Research Data Infrastructure for Chemistry (NFDI4Chem) and in August 2022, he became vice President for digitalisation of the Friedrich Schiller University. Together with a few other chemists he was a founder member of the
Blue Obelisk movement in 2005. Steinbeck was past
editor-in-chief of the
Journal of Cheminformatics, past director of the
Metabolomics Society, past chair of the Computers-Information-Chemistry division of the
German Chemical Society, past trustee of the
Chemical Structure Association Trust, and a lifetime member of the
World Association of Theoretically Oriented Chemists. == References ==