Peter Wright is a Professor in the Department of Integrative Structural and Computational Biology and holds the Cecil H. and Ida M. Green Chair of Biomedical Research at The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Auckland, New Zealand in 1972. After postdoctoral training with Professor R.J.P. Williams at the University of Oxford, he joined the faculty at the University of Sydney, Australia in 1976. In 1984, he moved to the United States as a Professor in the Department of Molecular Biology at The Scripps Research Institute, and was Chair of that department from 1987-2012.

His research has focused on applications of nuclear magnetic resonance to study mechanisms of protein folding, the structural basis of protein-protein and protein-nucleic acid interactions in the regulation of gene expression, and the role of dynamics in protein function. His work on protein interactions led to the realization that many proteins do not adopt stably-folded, globular structures but are intrinsically disordered, and that protein disorder plays an important functional role in cellular signaling networks. He has been Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Molecular Biology since 1990. He is a Member of the National Academy of Sciences and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.