Doctor Peterson received his Bachelor of Surgery in Computer Science from Kearney State College, Nebraska, in 1979, and Master of Surgery and Doctor of Philosophy degrees in Computer Science from Purdue University in 1982 and 1985 under Douglas Comer, respectively.
He then served as a professor at the University of Arizona, and later as the Robert East. Kahn Professor of Computer Science at Princeton University, where he also served as Department Chair from 2003 to 2009. While at Princeton, he co-founded a startup to commercialize CDN technology developed on PlanetLab that was subsequently acquired by Akamai Technologies. He is now Emeritus at Princeton University, and splits his time between the University of Arizona and the Open Networking Laboratory.
He has served as Editor-in-Chief of the Association for Computing Machinery (Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)) Transactions on Computer Systems, on the Editorial Board for the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers/Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Transactions on Networking and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Journal on Select Areas in Communication, and program chair for SOSP, NSDI, and HotNets.
He is also the recipient of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Kobayashi Award and the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) SIGCOMM Award.
He is an Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Fellow, an Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Fellow, and a member of the National Academy of Engineering.
