Jump to content

Carsten Peterson

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Carsten Peterson
Born (1945-10-04) 4 October 1945 (age 79)
NationalitySwedish
Known forComputational biology
SpouseLotten Peterson (born Arbén)
ChildrenSindra Peterson Årsköld Hanna Strömberg
AwardsGöran Gustafsson Prize (1991), Edlund Prize (2007) [1]
Scientific career
Thesis Phenomenological investigations in hadron physics with emphasis on quark structure  (1977)
Websitehttp://home.thep.lu.se/~carsten/

Carsten Peterson, born in 1945 and married to journalist Lotten Peterson, is a Swedish theoretical physicist and professor at Lund University. His current field of research is computational biology.

After finishing his PhD studies in theoretical physics at Lund University in 1977,[2] Peterson worked as a postdoctoral researcher at NORDITA in Copenhagen (1978-1979) and at Stanford University (1980-1982) before returning to Lund. He has since then been active there, except for a sabbatical period (1986-1988) when he hold a Senior Scientist position at Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation in Austin, Texas. Peterson is a professor in theoretical physics and was elected to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in 2006.

Peterson's field of research was originally theoretical particle physics and statistical mechanics. In the late 1980s he switched interests into machine learning methods, mostly Artificial Neural Networks (ANN), for pattern recognition and image processing as well as algorithms for difficult optimization problems. In particular, he mapped the latter onto spin systems in physics – a field that is now gaining attention when it comes to quantum computers. With regard to pattern recognition, he early on contributed with a learning algorithm for ANN, the mean field method to speed up the "Boltzmann Machine". His group in Lund were somewhat of pioneers when it came to clinical predictors using machine learning. Since the early 1990s he has mostly been active within the interface between physics and biology with focus on biomarkers for serious diseases as well as gene regulation – the latter often with a network perspective approached with mechanistic methods. His currently focused on how and when stem cells commit to become mature cells.

Peterson is keen on whenever possible confronting his computational results with the real world and his activities are often performed imbedded within experimental groups.

As his interests increasingly went beyond more conventional physics, he pioneered the formation of a Complex Systems division within theoretical physics at Lund University (1989), which later evolved into Computational Biology (2000).

References

[edit]
  1. ^ "Royal Academy of Sciences press release". Retrieved 2016-08-16.
  2. ^ Peterson, Carsten (1977). Phenomenological investigations in hadron physics with emphasis on quark structure.