Professor Peter Waterhouse is a Federation Fellow in the School of Biological Science and School of Molecular Biosciences at the University of Sydney. He is also an Honorary Fellow at CSIRO Plant Industries, Canberra. Following an undergraduate degree at Cambridge, Peter completed his PhD in 1982 at the Scottish Crop Research Institute, UK, and then moved to Australia, taking up a position at CSIRO Plant Industries. He established his research career at CSIRO, making many seminal discoveries, including the landmark findings on the use of RNA interference in plants and the elucidation of the associated plant RNAi machinery. In 2008 he moved to take up his Federation Fellowship in Sydney. He has received many medals and awards including the Victor Chang medal (2002), the CSIRO Chairmans medal (2005), Prime Ministers prize for Science (2007) and was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science (2009).