His dissertation, Points about Observation in Science, was supervised by Manley Thompson and Dudley Shapere.
[7] Machamer's work has been influential in developing an account of scientific explanation understood as the search for and filling in of mechanisms.
His co-authored 2000 article (with Lindley Darden and Carl Craver) “Thinking about Mechanisms”, published in Philosophy of Science, has been cited over 3,000 times.
Machamer supervised many PhD students working across a wide variety of different areas of history and philosophy of science during his time at Pitt.
Many of his former students contributed to an edited volume in his honour: Eppur Si Muove: Doing History and Philosophy of Science With Peter Machamer (Springer 2017).