Peter D. Wentzell is a Professor of Chemistry at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada.  He obtained his B.Sc. in Chemistry from Dalhousie University in 1982 and his Ph.D. in Analytical Chemistry from Michigan State University (East Lansing, MI) in 1987, working under the direction of Prof. Stanley Crouch.  He then worked as a Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (Canada) Post-doctoral Fellow with Dr. Adrian Wade at the University of British Columbia (Vancouver, BC, Canada) before taking up his current position at Dalhousie.  He also spent sabbatical leave periods at the Center for Process Analytical Chemistry (CPAC) at the University of Washington with Prof. Bruce Kowalski in 1996, and in the Biology Department at the University of New Mexico with Prof. Margaret Werner-Washburne in 2003.

Dr. Wentzell’s general research interests are in the area of chemometrics, with a focus on the study of the experimental measurement errors, signal processing, bioinformatics, and exploratory data analysis.  The role of measurement errors in multivariate data analysis has been a central theme of his research, with an emphasis on the characterization of measurement error structure and the development of methods to make optimal use of measurement error information in chemometric methods.  This led to the development of maximum likelihood principal components analysis (MLPCA) which provided a general framework for the optimal estimation of subspace models in multivariate analysis.  These principles have been extended to a variety of applications within the field of chemistry and beyond.  More recently, alternative approaches to exploratory data analysis, including projection pursuit methods.

Dr. Wentzell served as the North American Editor for the journal Chemometrics and Intelligent Laboratory Systems  from 1998 to 2006 and was awarded the 2014 Kowalski Prize for the Best Theoretical Paper in the Journal of Chemometrics (2012-2013) for his paper entitled “Exploratory Data Analysis with Noisy Measurements”.  In recognition of his academic achievements at Dalhousie University, he was named a Faculty of Science Killam Professor (2009-2014), and presented with the Faculty of Science Award for Excellence in Teaching (2010) and the Outstanding Faculty Advisor Award in 2011.