Rate My Professor Peter Christen

Professor Peter Christen is Professor Emeritus and Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy in the School of Computing at the Australian National University (ANU). He earned a Doctor of Philosophy in Computer Science from the University of Basel, Switzerland, in 1999, and a Diploma in Computer Science Engineering from ETH Zürich, Switzerland, in 1995. Christen joined ANU in 2001 as a Lecturer and Researcher in the Department of Computer Science within the Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology, progressing to Senior Lecturer from 2007 to 2012, Associate Professor from 2013 to 2015, and Professor since 2016. He has served in administrative capacities including Associate Dean for Higher Degree Research in the ANU College of Engineering and Computer Science from 2009 to 2011 and Graduate Studies Field Convener for Computer Science from 2008 to 2009. Since 2022, he has been Research Lead on the Scottish Historic Population Platform at the Scottish Centre for Administrative Data Research, University of Edinburgh.

Christen's research centers on data science, with expertise in record linkage, entity resolution, duplicate detection, privacy-preserving techniques, scalability, data quality, and machine learning applications. He developed the Febrl open-source system for data cleaning, deduplication, and record linkage. With over 200 publications and nearly 20,000 citations, key works include the books "Data Matching: Concepts and Techniques for Record Linkage, Entity Resolution, and Duplicate Detection" (Springer, 2012) and "Linking Sensitive Data" (co-authored with Thilina Ranbaduge and Rainer Schnell, Springer, 2020). He has received awards such as the Vice-Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Supervision (2014), Dean's Awards for Teaching Excellence and Supervision (2013), ANU Top Supervisor Awards (2011 and 2012), and a Simons Foundation Fellowship at the Isaac Newton Institute (2016). Christen has supervised multiple PhD students to completion, served on editorial boards including the International Journal of Population Data Science, and organized conferences like AusDM.