Jay S. Siegel received his Ph. D. from Princeton working with Kurt Mislow.  He was a Swiss Universites Fellow at ETH Zurich, with Professor Jack. D. Dunitz, and NSF-CNRS postdoctoral fellow at the University of Louis Pasteur in Strasbourg with Jean-Marie Lehn.  He began as Assistant Professor of Chemistry in 1986 at UCSD, was promoted to Associate Professor in 1992 and Full Professor in 1996.  In 2003, he was appointed as Professor and co-director of the Organic chemistry institute of the University of Zurich (UZH) and Director of its laboratory for process chemistry research (LPF). He is Dean of Studies and Head of the Research Council for the Faculty of Sciences at UZH. 

Prof. Siegel was a US-NSF Presidential Young Investigator in 1988, an American Cancer Society Jr. Fellow in 1990, an Alfred P. Sloan Fellow in 1992, and an Arthur C. Cope Scholar by the ACS in 1998.  He was elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1998, and fellow of Royal Society of Chemistry in 2007. He was visiting professor at Princeton, Caltech, University of Basel, the Weizmann Institute and Tokyo Institute of Technology.

He is executive board member of the Swiss Chemical Society (SCS), the Society of Swiss Chemical Industries, and EuCheMs. He founded the Organic Chemistry Division of EuCheMs.  He is Editor in Chief of Topics in Stereochemistry, head of the editorial advisory board of Organic and Biomolecular Chemistry, volume editor for Science of Synthesis – Aromatic Compounds, and member of the editorial advisory board of J. Phys Org. Chem.