Peter R. Jaffé is Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Princeton University.  He was Chair of the department of Civil and Environmental Engineering from 1999 to 2005. His background is in chemical engineering, and he obtained a Ph.D. in Environmental and Water Resources Engineering from Vanderbilt University in 1981.  He held the position of Research Associate in the Department of Civil Engineering at Princeton University from 1982 to 1983, and was a faculty member at the Universidad Simón Bolívar in Venezuela from 1983 to 1985.  He joined the faculty of the Department of Civil Engineering at Princeton University in 1985, and was department chair from 1999 to 2005.  He held visiting positions at the Venezuelan Research Institute and the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Austria.  He has served on numerous committees and panels, including the National Research Council, EPA, NIH, NSF, and DOE.

His research interests relate to the physical, chemical, and biological processes that govern the transport and transformation of pollutants in the environment, and their application towards the remediation of contaminated systems.  Areas of current emphasis include:  (1) biological and chemical processes in porous media;  (2) simulation and analysis at the watershed scale of soil contamination processes; and (3) dynamics of trace metals and radionuclides in sediments, wetland soils, and groundwater.