Bjoern Peters

Dr. Peters is a Professor at the La Jolla Institute for Immunology in San Diego, California. He has worked on the development and validation of tools to analyze and predict which parts of a pathogen, allergen, or cancer cell are targeted by immune responses since he started his PhD in theoretical biophysics at the Humboldt Unversity in Berlin, Germany. Identifying these specific molecular targets of immune responses, called epitopes, recognized by diseased individuals opens a path toward developing diagnostics, vaccines, and therapeutics. The machine learning tools the Peters lab develops aim to reduce the experimental effort required to identify these targets, as reviewed here. Dr. Peters has been the bioinformatics lead of the Immune Epitope Database (IEDB) since 2004. Since 2006, Dr. Peters has been the principal investigator of many NIH grants and contracts for both computational and experimental epitope mapping and characterization. His work has been recognized by ISI as a ‘Highly cited researcher’ for interdisciplinary studies (since 2019), and he has an h-index of 112 on google scholar.