Peter is an Associate Professor in Public Health at Northumbria University, where he manages the AskFuse service. AskFuse is the rapid response and evaluation service of Fuse, the Centre for Translational Research in Public Health, which supports collaborative projects between academics and policy and practice partners in the North East of England and beyond.

He is Deputy-Lead for the Knowledge Mobilisation and Implementation Science theme within the NIHR Applied Research Collaboration (ARC) for the North East and North Cumbria (NENC), and a member of the NIHR Public Health Intervention Response Studies Team (PHIRST Fusion), which supports local authorities across the UK with evaluating their interventions. For example, he is leading an evaluation of the Whole Systems Approach to Child Healthy Weight in Dundee applying a peer research approach.  

Previously, he held a prestigious NIHR Knowledge Mobilisation Research Fellowship, using ethnographic research to evaluate a System-Led Improvement Approach to Best Start in Life that developed professional peer reviewers between local authorities to improve evidence-informed decision making.

Peter is interested in the interface between research, practice and policy making and how this interface facilitates (or hinders) social improvement processes at local, regional, national and international levels. He conducts research on knowledge mobilisation in public health, with a focus on the wider determinants of health (e.g. housing, health landscapes, urban regeneration) and how they affect people's health and wellbeing.