Peter Walter was born in 1954 in Berlin, Germany and is currently Professor of Biochemistry and Biophysics at the University of California, San Francisco and an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, USA. He graduated from the Free University of Berlin in 1976, received his MS degree in Organic Chemistry from Vanderbilt University in 1977, and obtained his PhD in Biochemistry at The Rockefeller University in 1981. He was Assistant Professor at The Rockefeller University in 1982, and joined the University of California, San Francisco in 1983. 

He is a member of the US National Academy of Sciences, and the German Academy of Natural Scientists Leopoldina.He received Lasker Award in 2014 for discoveries concerning the unfolded protein response — an intracellular quality control system that detects harmful misfolded proteins in the endoplasmic reticulum and signals the nucleus to carry out corrective measures.