Peter Sarnak is a 1980 PhD graduate of Stanford University. He has been a professor at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Stanford University and Princeton University, where he is currently Higgins Chair of Mathematics. He has held a Sloan Fellowship, NSF's Presidential Young Investigator award, and a Sherman Fairchild Visiting Professorship at Caltech.

He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and has received the Polya Prize of the Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics and the Cole Prize of the American Mathematical Society.

He has served as chair of the mathematics department at Princeton University as well as on the scientific advisory committees of the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute (Berkeley), the Institut des Hautes Scientifiques (Paris), and the National Science Foundation.

He serves on the editorial board of the Annals of Mathematics and other leading research journals in mathematics.