Werner Urland was born in Berlin on 13 April 1944. Between 1963 and 1968 he studied and graduated in chemistry in Giessen, Germany. The interval 1968-1971 was dedicated to the work of a doctoral thesis, under the supervision of Professor R. Hoppe, on ternary oxides of noble metals. The PhD stage incorporated a scholarship at University College in London, in the group of Dr. Malcolm Gerloch under the supervision of Professor Lord Jack Lewis (Jack Lewis, Baron Lewis of Newnham, where the acquaintance with the magnetic properties and specific models of coordination compounds had defined a turning point in his career. The following post-doctoral stage (1971-1974) in preparative solid-state chemistry and the return to England, at Cambridge, in the theory group directed by Prof. A. D. Buckingham, contoured an original composition of scientific interests, at the confluence of applied chemistry with the theoretical insight, aiming for understanding and predicting useful properties.
Assimilating the different formation sources, Werner Urland contoured his original perspective in the magnetochemistry of rare earth compounds, the domain delineated by his habilitation treatise (1975-1980).
Between 1982 and 1986 he occupied a research position at the Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research in Stuttgart. Since 1986 he has been appointed professor in Hanover, where he acted till his retirement in 2007, on a chair dedicated to special topics of inorganic chemistry. In 1996 he declined an invitation to occupy a position as professor of inorganic chemistry at the University of Vienna. Since 2011, Werner Urland occupies a senior researcher position on grants, in the group of theoretical and computational chemistry of Professor Claude Daul, at University of Fribourg, Switzerland. Presently, Werner Urland is dealing with setting up an institute in Muralto/Locarno, Switzerland, with the help of the "Fondazione Sciaroni", dedicated to theoretical approach of material sciences and property design, thus supporting experimental work by universities and industries.