Peter Karp, Ph.D., Technical Director of the Bioinformatics Research Group at SRI International, works in the interdisciplinary field of bioinformatics, which develops computer-science methods for managing and analyzing the burgeoning quantities of biological data and knowledge.

Karp has been a pioneer in metabolic-pathway bioinformatics. His group has developed a metabolic-pathway database called EcoCyc that charts the complete biochemical factory within an Escherichia coli cell. His group has also developed algorithms for visualization of metabolic networks, for predicting anti-bacterial drug targets within metabolic networks, and for predicting the metabolic pathways of an organism whose genome has been sequenced. The latter algorithm has been applied to thousands of organisms to produce the BioCyc database collection.

Karp was named an SRI Fellow in 2008.