David Peterson

David Peterson is Associate Professor of Sociology at Purdue University. He received his PhD in Sociology from Northwestern University in 2018 and completed postdoctoral fellowships at UCLA's Institute for Society and Genetics, working with Aaron Panofsky and Jacob Foster. His research examines how scientific fields evaluate knowledge and expertise, and how those evaluation systems shape the direction of scientific inquiry.

Peterson is the author of The Unbuilt Bench (Columbia University Press, 2025). His current work traces the emergence of benchmarking in AI, and highlights its significance for current efforts to automate science. This includes a study of AlphaFold and structural biology that asks what happens to scientific expertise and evaluation when AI systems can predict outcomes that remain difficult for humans to independently assess. Together, this research asks what the future of scientific expertise looks like as AI increasingly reshapes how knowledge is produced and judged.

Specializations: Science and technology, expertise, metascience, AI and society, qualitative methods