Peter Wilson

Peter has recently started as Leader of Science Education at the Kings School in Parramatta.Professor Peter Wilson was also Director of Special Projects at Southern Cross University from March 2019, after having been Associate Dean Global at the University of Tasmania for the previous five years. Prior to that he was Director of the G30 Program and Professor of Life and Environmental Sciences at the University of Tsukuba in Japan.Professor Wilson graduated in Physics from the University of Otago, NZ, in 1981, gained an MSc in Electronics, also from Otago, in 1984 and completed his PhD at Otago in 1989. After several postdoctoral fellowships at Otago and at Victoria University Wellington, Peter joined Cornell university, researching cryobiology and lipid bilayer phase transitions using x-ray diffraction.Peter’s research career has taken him to California as a Research Fellow at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, where he has been on the staff as Adjunct since 2007. He has also worked at the University of Copenhagen and Houston University, predominantly researching ice nucleation. Notable achievements in physics have been the most accurate measurement to date of the thickness of the ice-water interface and the first measurement of the voltage caused by ion exclusion as single ice crystals grow into salt solutions. Peter’s research has also included development of a new technique to measure the statistics of heterogeneous ice nucleation and so determine if additives are effective, such as low dose kinetic inhibitors in oil pipelines. He has worked extensively with Chevron Texaco and has enjoyed wide ranging collaborations with a number of leading research groups, such as measuring the ice-phobicity of slippery liquid infused porous substances, created at Harvard University.

September 2021