Annette Peters directs the Institute of Epidemiology at the Helmholtz Zentrum München – German Research Center for Environmental Health and is full Professor of Epidemiology at the Ludwig Maximilians Universität München, Germany. She studied biology and mathematics in Germany and epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health, Boston, USA. She pioneered work identifying the link between ambient particulate matter and cardiovascular disease. Today, she heads the population-based KORA cohort initiated in the mid-eighties in Augsburg, Germany and is a principal investigator of the German National Cohort, responsible for building its central biorepository. Since October 2018, she chairs the board of directors of the German National Cohort. Her research interest are age-related and chronic diseases and the improvement of individual risk prediction by integrating lifestyle, environmental factors, molecular and imaging markers to assess their relative impact on health. She has severed on numerous scientific panels including the group drafting the global guidelines on air pollution published in 2005 by the World Health Organization, a panel advising the International Olympic Committee during the Beijing Olympics in 2008 and has chaired a grant panel of the European Research Council.