Peter Donnelly, FRS is Professor of Statistical Science at the University of Oxford. He is a specialist in applied probability and has made contributions to coalescent theory. Peter was educated at the University of Queensland and Balliol College, Oxford. In 1988 he was elected to a chair at Queen Mary College, London, at the age of 29. He held a chair at the University of Chicago (1994–96) and was head of the Department of Statistics at the University of Oxford from 1996 to 2001. Since 2007, he has been Director, Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics (WTCHG) in Oxford, where he is currently based. He is a fellow at St Anne's College, Oxford.

He has been heavily involved in a number of large scale projects, such as the International HapMap Project and the Wellcome Trust Case Control Consortium, a genome-wide association study. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2006 and also elected as a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences in June 2008.