Gerhard Hilt was born in Andernach on the Rhine in 1968. He studied chemistry at the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität in Bonn (1987-1996), where he worked in the research group of Professor E. Steckhan where he worked on the electrochemical regeneration of cofactors in enzymatic oxidation reactions as part of his Diplom and doctoral thesis. At the end of 1996, he joined the working group of Professor M. F. Semmelhack at Princeton University, USA (BASF scholarship from the German National Academic Foundation), where he worked on stoichiometric organometallic chemistry. After two years, he joined the research group of Professor R. Noyori (Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2001) in Nagoya, Japan, to work in the field of asymmetric synthesis and catalysis. In autumn 1999 he started his independent research at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich as an Emmy-Noether scholarship holder of the DFG (mentor Professor P. Knochel). After his habilitation, he moved to Marburg in autumn 2002 as Professor of Organic Chemistry at Philipps University. In April 2017, he moved to the Chair of Organic Chemistry at the University of Oldenburg (successor to Prof. J. Martens).