Peter A. Ward, M.D. received his B.S. and M.D. from the University of Michigan (1958 and 1960). He pursued a year of Straight Medical Internship at Bellevue Hospital in New York City and returned to Ann Arbor to undertake two years of training in Anatomic Pathology. In 1963 he pursued a two-year post-doctoral fellowship at Scripps Clinic and Research Foundation (La Jolla, California) following which he entered active military duty as Captain, Medical Corps., in the U.S. Army, being assigned to the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology as Chief of the Immunobiology Branch. In 1971 he moved to the University of Connecticut Health Center (Farmington, Connecticut) and in 1973 became Head of the Department of Pathology in Farmington.

In 1980 he returned to the University of Michigan as Professor and Chairman, Department of Pathology. He is the Godfrey D. Stobbe Professor of Pathology, has served on numerous national review boards, has been President of the United States and Canadian Academy of Pathology, the American Board of Pathology, the American Society for Experimental Pathology, and Universities Associated for Education and Research in Pathology and served as Interim Dean of the University of Michigan Medical School from 1982-1985. Dr. Ward received the Gold Headed Cane Award, presented by the American Society of Investigative Pathology (ASIP) in Orlando (FL) in April, 2001. This award is given to one member of ASIP in recognition of long-term, outstanding contributions to academic Pathology. Dr. Ward has previously received the two other awards from ASIP, the Parke-Davis Award in Experimental Pathology (1972) given to a young investigator, and the Rous-Whipple Award (1996) given to a senior scientist with continuing outstanding research productivity. He is a member of the Institute of Medicine (of the National Academy of Sciences), a Fellow in the American Association for the Advancement of Science and a member of the Association of American Physicians. Besides being a leader in academic Pathology, his research interests involve molecular mechanisms of the inflammatory response. His research activities relate to mediators and regulators of the inflammatory response, with a particular emphasis on cytokines, complement and protease inhibitors. He has more than 400 papers in peer-reviewed journals.