Peter Hotchkiss has been working in the WMD/CBRNE space for 12 years. He joined the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemicals Weapons in 2020 as the Senior Science Policy Officer where he provides scientific advice to the Director-General and the Technical Secretariat and acts as the Secretary to the OPCW Scientific Advisory Board. Prior to joining the OPCW, he spent 11 years at Sandia National Laboratories (SNL), a United States Department of Energy National Lab. While there he initially worked on fundamental research regarding energetic materials’ properties and explosives detection modalities. He then decided to pivot his career into countering chemical threats, joining, in 2015, SNL’s Global Chemical and Biological Security group. There he worked on implementing cooperative threat reduction initiatives on behalf of the United States Government, assisting countries in preventing the theft and misuse of chemicals.

Peter received bachelors’ degrees in both Chemistry and Linguistics from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and received his Ph.D. in Organic Materials Chemistry at the Georgia Institute of Technology.