Peter held an EPSRC Leadership Fellowship from 2010-2014 and a Royal Society University Research Fellowship from 1999-2007. He took his PhD in Edinburgh in 1995, supervised by Robin Milner, before which he studied Natural Sciences and Engineering in Cambridge and has an MSc in Computation from Oxford. He was Director of Studies in Computer Science for Wolfson from 1998-2008.
His research aims to build rigorous foundations for the engineering of real-world computer systems, to make them better-understood, more robust, and more secure. He and his colleagues have recently focussed on the relaxed-memory concurrency models of multiprocessors and concurrent languages (x86, ARM, IBM Power, and C/C++11), on verified compilation of concurrency (CompCertTSO and the concurrency compilation schemes from C/C++11 to x86, Power, and ARM), and on tools for applied semantics. He previously worked on various topics in programming languages, network protocols, security, and concurrency theory.
Peter was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in May 2023.