Peter Schmieder was born in 1963 in Frankfurt/Main, Germany.
He studied chemistry at the Johann-Wolfgang-Goethe University in Frankfurt, where he obtained his diploma under the supervision of Horst Kessler in 1988. He then moved to the TU Munich together with Prof. Kessler and finished his Ph.D. in 1991. In 1992 he changed to the Department of BCMP at Harvard Medical School and worked with Gerhard Wagner until 1995. In 1995 he became group leader of the NMR-group in the department of NMR-assisted structural biology at the FMP in Berlin, the group was later on named "AG Solution State NMR".
His research interests are the development of new NMR-spectroscopic techniques for the structure elucidation of large molecular systems as well as the determination of three-dimensional structures of peptides and proteins, more recently photochromic proteins.