He is a professor at the Queensland University of Technology and a Chief Investigator at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Plant Success in Nature and Agriculture.
Peter Waterhouse received his Bachelor of Science degree (1977) from the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, UK, and his Doctor of Philosophy degree (1981) from the Scottish Crop Research Institute at the University of Dundee.
He joined CSIRO Plant Industry as a Research Scientist in 1981[1] and was the leader of the virology program from 1989 to 1999 (excluding 1992).
In 2008, he was awarded the Federation Fellowship and took up a professorship in the School of Molecular and Microbial Biosciences at the University of Sydney.
In the late 1990s, Waterhouse led the CSIRO group which discovered that gene silencing and transgene-mediated virus resistance in plants were induced and targeted by double-stranded RNAs.