Peter R Bergethon

Peter Bergethon is a storyteller and explorer. He has made a living telling stories as a teacher and writing about discoveries in the natural world as a professional physician-scientist. As a biophysical chemist and neurologist, he cared for patients and wandered between the bedside and the lab bench asking: "How can I build a machine that I could tell stories to and it would laugh and cry?" He is equally at home in the field looking for the earth’s story as an amateur geologist or exploring the dynamics of the oceans as a SCUBA diver. An avid outdoorsman who tells a heart stopping ghost-story at the campfire, he has written or contributed to over 130 research papers and books including the SymmetryScience K-8 science education program - a science literacy program teaching and telling the story of science as “way of looking at the world”. He is the single author of “The Physical Basis of Biochemistry: The Foundations of Molecular Biophysics, 2nd Ed., (New York:Springer-Verlag, 2010).

A graduate from Williams College with honors in biology for research in neurocybernetics he then earned an M.D. from Jefferson Medical College. He is board certified in Internal Medicine and in Neurology following dual residencies at Boston City Hospital. In 1995 he won the Founder’s Award from the American Academy of Neurology for work showing the arrest and reversal of neuropathy in familial amyloidotic neuropathy following liver transplantation thus participating in establishing a probable cure in a fatal disease. In addition to his early work in the neurological amyloid diseases, he developed ground-breaking insights into the role of electrokinetic vascular streaming potentials in physiology and in machine intelligence. With Dr. Mark Moss, he pioneered the field of the Neurobiology of Education and was an academic professor in Biochemistry, Anatomy, Neurobiology, Bioengineering and Neurology before joining industry in 2012. At Pfizer and Biogen he was an executive leader in Research and Development leading departments of Quantitative Medicine and Pfizer’s Innovation Research Laboratories.