Dr. Peterson, Professor, received his B.S. (honors) in Zoology from the University of California-Davis, and his Ph.D. in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology from the University of California-Santa Barbara. Prior to joining Iowa State University in 1993 as an Associate Professor, Dr. Peterson was an NSF Postdoctoral Fellow at CSIRO, Australia, Senior Staff Investigator at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (New York), and worked with the Genetics Program at SUNY-Stonybrook. In collaboration with the Department of Agronomy, Dr. Peterson is the Pioneer Chair in Maize Molecular Genetics.

Isolation and characterization of transposon-induced genome rearrangements via wet-lab and computational approaches. Analysis of how transposable elements affect gene expression and genome structure.