John A Peacock was born in 1956 in Shaftesbury, Dorset, UK and is currently Professor of Cosmology in the Institute for Astronomy at the University of Edinburgh.  He obtained his Bachelor degree in Natural Sciences in 1977 and a PhD in 1980 from the University of Cambridge. He was at the Royal Observatory, Edinburgh, first as Research Fellow in 1981, then as Tenured Research Astronomer in 1983, becoming the Head of Research in 1992.

 He has been Professor at the University of Edinburgh since 1998 and was the Head of the Institute for Astronomy from 2007 to 2013.  He is a Fellow of the Royal Society and of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.He was joint-winner of the 2014 Shaw Prize for their 2dF Galaxy Redshift Survey (2dFGRS) which together with the work of Daniel Eisenstein and his SDSS collaborators made the first detections of the baryon acoustic oscillation pattern in the distribution of galaxies in the Universe.