Achim Peters

Achim Peters is a German internist and brain researcher, born in Dortmund in 1957. He studied medicine at the Ruhr University in Bochum and in Lübeck, completing his studies and his doctorate in 1983, and joined the clinic of internal medicine at the University of Lübeck in 1984. After a postdoctoral fellowship at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, where he worked on control theory in diabetes mellitus, he specialized in endocrinology and diabetology and was habilitated in internal medicine in 1996. He has been a professor at the University of Lübeck, and since 2004 he has headed a research group funded by the German Research Foundation on the brain, glucose and metabolic syndrome. In 1998 he designed the basic model of the Selfish Brain Theory, which holds that the brain prioritizes its own high energy needs when the body regulates its energy supply, and he applies it to obesity and diabetes. He has written several books for general readers.