Jan Peters is a full professor (W3) for Intelligent Autonomous Systems at the Computer Science Department of the Technische Universitaet Darmstadt and at the same time an adjunct senior research scientist at the Max-Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, where he heads the interdepartmental Robot Learning Group between the departments of Bernhard Schoelkopf and Stefan Schaal.

Previously, Jan Peters has been a full-time Senior Research Scientist and Robot Learning Group Leader in the department of Bernhard Schoelkopf the Max-Planck Institute of Biological Cybernetics since 2007. Even earlier, he completed a Ph.D. at the Department of Computer Science at the University of Southern California (USC) in Los Angeles. There, Jan has been working with Stefan Schaal, Sethu Vijayakumar (now at U. Edinburgh, UK), and Firdaus Udwadia (Department of Mechanical Engineering). Chris Atkeson (Robotics Institute at CMU) and Gaurav Sukhatme also guided him to his thesis. In 2011, Jan Peters' PhD Thesis received the Dick Volz Best 2007 US PhD Thesis Runner Up Award based on thesis quality and thesis impact. Jan remains affiliated with the CLMC Lab as an invited researcher.