Professor Peter de Boves Harrington graduated from Randolph-Macon College in 1980 with a Baccalaureate of Science in Chemistry.  After which, he worked as flavor chemist for Nabisco from 1980-1982.  He has always maintained his interest in the analysis of foods and beverages.  At Nabisco he had two mentors, Bill Softly who directed Pete towards chemometrics and Lucy Gursky who encouraged Pete to pursue a PhD, which he did when the research center moved from Wilton, CT to Fairlawn, NJ.  In 1988, Pete graduated from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.  His PhD dissertation is titled Applications of Pattern Recognition and Artificial Intelligence to Some Problems in Analytical Chemistry under the guidance of Tom Isenhour.  Tom was also Bruce Kowalski’s PhD mentor, so Pete and Bruce are academic brothers.

From 1987-1989, Pete created the DOS-based software platforms Resolve and Presager for identifying bacteria from their pyrolysis-mass spectra while working for Kent Voorhees at the Colorado School of Mines.  Pete joined the faculty of Ohio University in 1989 as an Assistant Professor.  In 1992, he founded the Center for Intelligent Chemical Instrumentation.  He has over 200 publications and has made over 300 scientific presentations including many plenary and keynote speeches around the world.  In 2016, Pete won the Ohio University College of Arts & Sciences Outstanding Faculty Research Award and the 2019 Eastern Analytical Symposium Award for Outstanding Achievement in Chemometrics (the reason that you are reading this biography.  Pete is the Director of the Ohio University Center for Intelligent Chemical Instrumentation and is a Fellow of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences and the North American Academy of Sciences.  Currently, Pete’s research focuses on the development and coupling of artificial intelligence to chemotyping by spectrometric measurements of botanical medicines and foods.