Dr. Peterson earned his doctorate in Information Science from the University of Missouri-Columbia. He holds Bachelor’s degrees in Biochemistry, Chemistry and Spanish from New Mexico State University and a Master’s in Biotechnology from the University of Texas, San Antonio, where his research focused on the study of viruses. Prior to his career as an information scientist, he was a senior research specialist for the Maize Genome Project at the University of Missouri’s Department of Agronomy.

A recipient of a National Library of Medicine Bio- and Health- Informatics Research and Training Fellowship, Dr. Peterson has worked and published in areas such as scholarly communication, vocabulary control and information retrieval, and health informatics. His research is focused on formal scholarly communication, particularly with regard to the health sciences and technical literature. He was part of the group that won the 2001 Institute for Scientific Information Citation Analysis Research Award, and his project "The Effectiveness of Correction and Republication in the Biomedical Literature: A Bibliometric Analysis" received an honorable mention at last year’s ALISE doctoral student poster session.