Christoph Elschenbroich earned his Ph.D. with E. O. Fischer at Munich in 1966. After two years of post-doctoral study in Israel (1967-68, Weizmann Institute, Technion), he joined Metallgesellschaft AG (Frankfurt, 1969-70) to work on surface-chemical aspects of corrosion protection. During 1971-75 he did research at the University of Basel, Switzerland, dealing with applications of EPR spectroscopy to organometallic chemistry. This led to the "habilitation" in 1975. In the same year he moved to Marburg as a Professor of Inorganic Chemistry. He was visiting Professor at Zurich University (1981), Brookhaven National Laboratory (1986) and the Ecole Nationale Superieure de Chimie de Paris (1994).