He earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Biology with a Minor in Marine Environmental Science from the State University of New York at Stony Brook in 1991. He received a Ph.D. from the University of Maryland at College Park in the Department of Microbiology in 1996. Dr. Peters worked as a post-doctoral fellow with Dr. Nancy Craig in the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in the Department of Molecular Biology and Genetics at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.