Steinbeck received his Doctor of Philosophy from the University of Bonn in 1995 for work on LUCY, a software program for structural elucidation from nuclear magnetic resonance (Nuclear magnetic resonance) correlation experiments. In 2003 he received his habilitation.
Steinbeck"s research interests have involved the elucidation of chemical structures of metabolites. He has was one of the first chemists to develop open source tools for cheminformatics. Currently he heads the Cheminformatics and Metabolomics group at the European Bioinformatics Institute in the United Kingdom.
Steinbeck is editor-in-chief of the Journal of Cheminformatics, 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.
