Peter Ertl studied organic chemistry and received his PhD at the University of Bratislava. Then he joined Ciba-Geigy in Basel as a molecular modeler. After a merger with Sandoz to form Novartis, he became Head of the Cheminformatics group in Pharma Research, responsible for development of new methods for calculation of molecular properties and cheminformatics web tools for medicinal chemists.

Peter is author of more than 130 publications covering all areas of cheminformatics and computational chemistry. His major research interests include analysis and visualization of chemical space, bioisosteric design and interactive web tools supporting the work of medicinal chemists.

In the cheminformatics community Peter is known as the author of several cheminformatics algorithms that have become industry standards, including a fast fragment based method to calculate molecular polar surface area and methods to calculate synthetic accessibility or natural-products likeness of molecules.