Dr. Peter Mikhalevsky received the BA and MS degrees jointly from Harvard University in 1972. He was commissioned an officer in the U.S. Navy and was assigned duty as the Anti-Submarine Warfare Officer on a new class destroyer with an experimental towed array sonar. In 1975 Dr. Mikhalevsky returned to Cambridge and MIT for Ph.D. studies in underwater acoustics and oceanography, studying under Prof. Ira Dyer, then the Department Head of Ocean Engineering.

He received the Ph.D. degree in the spring of 1979 and completed his navy career with assignments at the Naval Underwater Systems Center, in New London, CT, and at the Pentagon in Washington, DC. Dr. Mikhalevsky was instrumental in the introduction of towed arrays in the U.S. Navy and many other ASW advances during his navy career. He left the navy after almost 12 years and joined the faculty of Ocean Engineering at MIT as an Associate Professor in late 1983, teaching acoustics and array processing.

Dr. Mikhalevsky joined SAIC in 1985 and shortly thereafter started a new division, which he continues to manage today, focusing on underwater acoustics and signal processing. He has pioneered the use of advanced signal processing and array processing techniques in the ocean for military and non-military applications. He has been the chief scientist of many ocean experiments around the world, including the Arctic Ocean. Dr. Mikhalevsky is the Principal Investigator of the Arctic Climate Observations using Underwater Sound (ACOUS) program which is a joint U.S./Russian project using acoustic thermometry and tomography to study climate change in the Arctic. In a seminal experiment in the spring of 1994, testing the feasibility of trans-Arctic acoustic propagation, the ACOUS team lead by Dr. Mikhalevsky discovered anomalous warming of mid-depth waters in the Arctic Ocean, subsequently confirmed by ice-breaker and submarine measurements. This and other measurements are revising our knowledge of Arctic Ocean circulation and leading to improved understanding of climate change in the Arctic and its relation to global climate change.

In late 1994 the ACOUS program drew the attention of Vice President Al Gore, and is currently one of the projects being executed under the umbrella of the Gore-Chernomyrdin Commission which is fostering scientific cooperation between the U.S. and Russia. Dr. Mikhalevsky has served on numerous National Academy of Sciences panels on topics ranging from the research requirements to support the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty to the future research requirements for the U.S. Navy. Dr. Mikhalevsky has continued his association with the Ocean Engineering Department at MIT through close collaboration with Prof. Art Baggeroer, MIT Ford Professor of Engineering (and a co-PI on the ACOUS project), and Prof. Henrik Schmidt on numerous technical projects over the years.

Today the Ocean Sciences Division (OSD) of SAIC has 42 full and part-time personnel with project revenues in excess of $10M/year. In addition to managing OSD Dr. Mikhalevsky is a Corporate Vice President of SAIC. For his research in underwater acoustics Dr. Mikhalevsky is the recipient of the Biennial Award (now the R. Bruce Lindsay Award) of the Acoustical Society of America, the A.B. Wood Medal and Prize from the Institute of Acoustics, U.K., and the Decibel Award from the Naval Undersea Warfare Center, New London, CT. Dr. Mikhalevsky was elected Fellow of the Acoustical Society of America in 1993.