Prof. Dr. Werner R. Thiel was born in Munich in 1961, he is married and has three children. After school and military service he started studying Chemistry at the Technische Universität München in 1981, which he finished in 1987. In 1990 he recieved his PhD based on a thesis he worked out in the group of Prof. Dr. Wolfgang A. Herrmann. 

Supported by a Feodor Lynen research grant of the Alexander von Humboldt foundation, Werner Thiel spent one year as a postdoc in the group of Prof. Dr. Didier Astruc at the Université de Bordeaux I. After returning to TUM he started his academic carreer with research on mechanistic details of the oxygen transfer in catalytic reactions of transition metal peroxo complexes (olefin epoxidation). In 1997 he finished his habilitation, which was supported by a DFG habilitation grant.

In 2000 Werner Thiel became associate professor at the Technische Universität Chemnitz and in 2004 he moved to a full-professorship in inorganic chemistry at the Technische Universität Kaiserslautern. From  2006 to 2016 he was managing director of the center for teacher's education at the Technische Universität Kaiserslautern and since 02/2017 he is dean of the department of Chemistry and senator of this university.