Dr. Peter Agre studied chemistry at Augsburg College (B.A. 1970) and medicine at Johns Hopkins (M.D. 1974). He completed his residency at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland and an Oncology Fellowship at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. A Johns Hopkins faculty member since 1984, Dr. Agre was Professor of Biological Chemistry and Professor of Medicine. In 2003, Dr. Agre shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for discovering aquaporins, a family of water channel proteins found throughout nature, responsible for numerous physiological processes in humans and implicated in multiple clinical disorders.

In 2005, Dr. Agre moved to the Duke University School of Medicine to become Vice Chancellor for Science and Technology and James B. Duke Professor of Cell Biology. Dr. Agre is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and chairs their Committee for Human Rights. On 1 January 2008 Dr. Agre has moved to Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health where he became Director of the Malaria Research Institute.