Ian R. Petersen was born in Victoria, Australia. He received a Ph.D in Electrical Engineering in 1984 from the University of  Rochester. From 1983 to 1985 he was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the  Australian National University. From 2017 he has been a Professor at the Australian National University in the School of Engineering. He was the Interim Director of  the  School of  Engineering at the Australian National University from 2018-2019. From 1985 until 2016 he was with UNSW Canberra where he was a Scientia Professor and an Australian Research Council Laureate Fellow in the  School of Engineering and Information Technology.  He has previously been ARC Executive Director for Mathematics Information and Communications, Acting Deputy Vice-Chancellor Research for UNSW and an Australian Federation Fellow.  He has served as an Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Automatic  Control, Systems and Control Letters, Automatica, IEEE Transactions on Control Systems Technology and SIAM Journal on  Control and Optimization. He also served as an Editor for Automatica. He is a fellow of IFAC, the IEEE and the Australian Academy of Science.

Ian's main research interests are in robust control theory, quantum control theory, stochastic control theory, and applications of control theory to the control of nano-scale systems and the control of electrical power systems.