Anton Peterlin

Anton Peterlin (September 25, 1908 – March 26, 1993) was a Slovene physicist.

Peterlin was born in Ljubljana, Slovenia. After receiving his D. Sc. in physics from
Alexander von Humboldt University in Berlin, Germany in 1938, Peterlin accepted in 1949 the chair as a professor of physics at the University of Ljubljana, where he remained for 22 years. Besides his pedagogical duties, he accepted in 1947 the position of the founding director of the Jožef Stefan Institute in Ljubljana. In 1961, Peterlin left for Duke University, where he also served as director of the Camille Dreyfus Laboratories at the Research Triangle Institute. Peterlin left North Carolina in 1973 to become a senior scientist at the National Bureau of Standards in Washington, DC, a post he held for two years.

Anton Peterlin was an internationally-acclaimed scientist, the author of more than 350 scholarly publications. For his research he received the highest Slovenia's scientific award: the France Prešeren award in 1955, the Bingham Medal for rheology in 1970 and the American Physical Society's Polymer Physics Prize for 1972. A specialist in polymers, among other areas, Peterlin was a member of numerous scientific societies, including the American Physical Society, the Deutsche Kolloid Gesellschaft, the Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft, and the Slovene Academy of Sciences and Arts (SAZU). His son, Boris Matija Peterlin is a distinguished biomedical researcher at the University of California, San Francisco.

Anton Peterlin died in Ljubljana.