Peter Malcolm Colman (born 1944)[5] is the head of the structural biology division at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research in Melbourne, Australia.

[7] Colman was educated at the University of Adelaide, where he received a Bachelor of Science degree in physics in 1966[5] and a PhD in 1969 for research on the chemical structure of parabanic acid complexes supervised by Harry Medlin.

work on apoptosis solves the long-standing problem of how pro-apoptotic Bax changes conformation to dimerise and then oligomerise and permeabilise the mitochondrial membrane, an essential step in the intrinsic cell-death pathway.

[22] In the Queen's 2017 Birthday Honours Colman was appointed a Companion of the Order of Australia (AC), Australia's highest civilian honour, "for eminent service to medical research, particularly in the fields of structural biology and medicinal chemistry, as a leader in the commercial translation of scientific discoveries, to professional organisations, and as a mentor of young scientists".

[25] “All text published under the heading 'Biography' on Fellow profile pages is available under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.” --Royal Society Terms, conditions and policies at the Wayback Machine (archived 2016-11-11) This article incorporates text available under the CC BY 4.0 license.