Peter J. Stang was born in 1941 in Nürnberg, Germany, raised in Hungary until 1956, and educated in the USA. He earned a B.S. (Magna cum laude) from DePaul University in Chicago in 1963 and a Ph.D. degree from the University of California at Berkeley in 1966. After NIH postdoctoral work at Princeton, he joined the faculty at Utah in 1969 where, since 1992, he holds the rank of Distinguished Professor of Chemistry. He served as Department Chair from 1989-1995 and as Dean of the College of Science at Utah from 1997-2007.

Professor Stang is also a Senior Fellow, since 1991, at the Loker Hydrocarbon Research Institute at the University of Southern California and since 2004 he is an Honorary Professor of Chemistry at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Institute of Chemistry (ICCAS) in Beijing, China, as well as Honorary Professor at Zhejiang University in Hanzhou, China.

In his 40 years in academia he has delivered hundreds of named lectures and invited lectures at both national and international institutions and conferences. He has served on numerous committees, advisory boards, board of directors and board of governors. He has been a Fulbright Fellow, a JSPS Fellow, a Lady Davis Visiting Professor, and an A.v. Humboldt Senior U.S. Scientist.

Stang is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a foreign member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. He has received the ACS James Flack Norris Award in Physical-Organic Chemistry (1998); the ACS George A. Olah Award in Hydrocarbon or Petroleum Chemistry (2003); the Linus Pauling Medal (2006) and the ACS Award for Creative Research and Applications of Iodine Chemistry (2007). He holds Honorary Doctorates of Science (D.Sc. honoris causa) from both Moscow State University, Moscow, Russia, and the Russian Academy of Sciences (1992).

After serving as an Associate Editor of JACS from 1982-1999 and Editor-in-Chief of JOC from 2000-2001, Professor Stang has been the Editor of JACS since 2002. He has authored or co-authored over 400 scientific publications including two dozen widely cited reviews. His early research involved unsaturated reactive intermediates like vinyl cations and unsaturated carbenes. More recently, he was involved in polyvalent iodine chemistry and in particular alkynyl iodonium salts and derived chemistry. His current research is centered in the area of supramolecular chemistry and self-assembly, with primary emphasis on using the coordination based "directional bonding" paradigm to self-assemble and study pre-designed metallacycles and metallacages such as cuboctahedra, dodecahedra etc. These systems are of significance in nanoscience and nanotechnology.

Besides chemistry he enjoys travel, classical music, gourmet food and wines.

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