Dr Peter John Bentley (born 16 May 1972) is a British author and computer scientist based at University College London. Peter J. Bentley is an Honorary Professor and Teaching Fellow at UCL, a Visiting Professor at Autodesk and a Collaborating Professor at KAIST. He is also a popular science author and consultant. He was a contributing editor for WIRED UK and was the monthly host of the Royal Institution's café scientifique. He currently writes for BBC Science Focus magazine. Born in Colchester, England, he achieved a BSc in Artificial Intelligence from the University of Essex (supervised by Edward Tsang) and a PhD in Evolutionary Design (supervised by Jonathan Wakefield) at the age of 24. His doctorate thesis was entitled Generic Evolutionary Design of Solid Objects using a Genetic Algorithm and pioneered the use of evolutionary computation for generative design. Since 1997 has been head of the Digital Biology Interest Group at the Department of Computer Science, University College Lon