Peter is a lifelong scholar and educator, an experienced academic leader, a social entrepreneur, and an advisor to business and government leaders. From 2011-2021 he served as the Peter Moores Dean of the School.

His work spans financial innovation, financial markets and institutions, and financial engineering – and for more than two decades, has focused on household finance. His current work continues that focus, in addition to projects on climate finance, leadership transitions, and the Ownership Project at Oxford, where he has was the Co-Principal Investigator.

As Dean, Peter has championed the mission of making business and business education a force for justice. This approach is supported by acknowledging the business school’s integral role within the broader university, with the goal of arming students to be systems leaders who can use business to tackle world scale challenges, such as climate change.

Peter is a social entrepreneur. In 2000, he founded, and now chairs, a non-profit, buildcommonwealth.org (formally Doorways to Dreams Fund). This organisation works with partners to help American households successfully manage their financial needs. Peter’s research on consumer finance, and the work of Commonwealth, contributed to the passage of the American Savings Promotion Act in December 2014, which removed federal barriers to sale of prize linked savings products in the US. He is currently working on research on the impact of the newly-launched Advance Child Tax Credit.

Prior to joining Oxford, Peter was a faculty member at Harvard Business School for 22 years. At HBS, he assumed a number of leadership roles, including department chair, course head, and Senior Associate Dean. He oversaw the school’s tenure and promotion processes, campus planning, and university relations. He advised the University on financial and real estate matters. He was the founding co-chair of the Harvard Innovation Lab (i-lab), a cross-university initiative to foster entrepreneurship. During his sabbatical in 2021-22, he will be a Visiting Professor at Harvard Business School and a Visiting Scholar at Harvard Kennedy School’s Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government.

Peter earned his AB in Economics (summa cum laude), MBA (with high distinction) and PhD in Business Economics at Harvard University. He is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences, and recently earned certification in Sustainability and Climate Risk from GARP.