Besides his pedagogical duties, he accepted in 1947 the position of the founding director of the Jožef Stefan Institute in Ljubljana.

In order to be able to continue his theoretical research on macromolecules he accepted the position of a full professor and head of the Institute of Physics at the Technical University of Munich, Germany.

Anton Peterlin was an internationally acclaimed scientist, the author of nearly 400 scholarly publications.

A specialist in polymers, Peterlin was a member of numerous scientific societies, including the American Physical Society, the Deutsche Kolloid Gesellschaft, the Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft, and the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts.

His son Boris Matija Peterlin is a distinguished biomedical researcher at the University of California, San Francisco.