Peter Petrik received his MSc and PhD degrees from the Technical University of Budapest in engineering and physics, respectively. He was a visiting scientist in Germany, in the USA and in the Netherlands for a total of more than five years in frame of different grants and projects. In 2012 and 2013 he worked in thin film metrology and scatterometry projects of the European Metrology Research Programme in Germany and the Netherlands.
He was the first winner of the Drude Award founded at the 4th International Conference of Spectroscopic Ellipsometry in 2007 for "exceptional contributions to the development and application of spectroscopic ellipsometry" in a range of applications including ion implanted and polycrystalline silicon. He received the prizes for young researchers and postdocs from the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and from the Research Institute for Technical Physics and Materials Science in 2000 and 2001, respectively.
His research involves the ellipsometric modeling of non-uniform, composite nanostructures including the development of ellipsometric models for the characterization of surface roughness, nanocrystalline semiconductors, photonic and organic structures. He also took part in the development of new concepts for ellipsometric hardware.
He has participated in more than 20 international and national research projects and has been collaborating with over 20 research groups worldwide in the past 15 years, coordinating and leading research groups in more than half of them. He has been the supervisor of 4 PhD and 7 MSc/BSc students. He has published 135 papers and 4 book chapters, held 21 oral (12 invited) presentations at international conferences.