Benjamin List was born in Frankfurt am Main in 1968. He studied chemistry at the Free University of Berlin and received his PhD from the Goethe University in Frankfurt (1997, Prof. G. Mulzer).

He worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, United States from 1997 to 1998 and as an assistant professor from 1999 to 2003.

In 2003, he moved to the Max-Planck-Institut für Kohlenforschung in Mülheim, Ruhr as head of a research group and became one of the directors there in 2005. He still holds this position today. He also heads a research group at Hokkaido University in Japan and is an honorary professor at the University of Cologne. List has been awarded dozens of prestigious prizes in the field of chemistry.

In 2021, he received the Nobel Prize for his work on asymmetric organocatalysis. List lives in Mülheim Ruhr, he is married and father of two grown-up sons