His research focuses on using data-centric languages and analysis techniques to build and reason about data-intensive distributed systems, in order to make them scalable, predictable and robust to the failures and nondeterminism endemic to large-scale distribution. Peter is the creator of the Dedalus language and co-creator of the Bloom language. While pursuing his PhD at while UC Berkeley, Peter co-developed and taught Programming the Cloud, an undergraduate course that explored distributed systems concepts through the lens of software development. Prior to attending Berkeley, Peter worked as a Senior Software Engineer in the data analytics team at Ask.com. Peter's principal research interests are databases, distributed systems and programming languages.