Jan Peters has been a full-time professor of intelligent autonomous systems in the Department of Computer Science at the Technical University of Darmstadt in Germany since 2011. Since 2022, he has been the head of the research department of artificial intelligence (SAIROL) for robot learning system in the German Artificial Intelligence Research Center (DFKI). Founding research member of the Hessian Center for Artificial Intelligence in Hesse, Germany. He also won the second prize for Dick Volz's Best Doctoral Dissertation in the United States in 2007, participated in the "Early Career Highlights" section of the Robotics Science and Systems Conference (RSS), received the Young Researcher Award from the International Neural Network Society (INNS), and the Young Scientist Award from the IEEE Robotics&Automation Society. In addition, he has also won multiple Best Paper Awards. In 2015, he received a start-up grant from the European Research Council (ERC), became an IEEE Fellow in 2019, an ELLIS Fellow in 2020, and an AAIA Fellow in 2021.
Jan Peters studied computer science, electrical, mechanical, and control engineering at the Technical University of Munich (TU Munich), FernUni Hagen, the National University of Singapore (NUS), and the University of Southern California (USC) in Germany, and obtained master's degrees in these four disciplines as well as a PhD in computer science from the University of Southern California. He has also worked at DLR, Technical University of Munich, and Max Planck Institute for Biological Control Theory in Germany. In addition, relevant research is conducted at the Advanced Telecommunications Research Center (ATR) in Japan, the University of Southern California, as well as at the National University of Singapore and Siemens Advanced Engineering. He has led machine learning research teams in robotics technology at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Control Theory (2007-2010) and the Institute for Intelligent Systems (2010-2021).