Péter Mészáros is the Eberly Chair of Astronomy & Astrophysics and Professor of Physics at the Pennsylvania State University, where he is Director of the Center for Particle and Gravitational Astrophysics, and member of the directorate of the Institute for Gravity and the Cosmos. He served as head of the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics in 1993-2003, and he is the theory lead of the Swift satellite consortium, affiliated member of the Fermi satellite consortium, and member of the IceCube experiment team.

Born in Hungary and raised in Belgium and Argentina, he received his M.S. in Physics from the National University of Buenos Aires, followed by a Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1972. He was a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton and Cambridge Universities before joining the permanent staff of the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Garching, Germany. He has held long term visiting appointments at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center; the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics; Cambridge University; the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton; CalTech; and the Kavli Institute of Theoretical Physics, UCSB. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, and Fellow of the American Physical Society; he has been a co-recipient (twice) of the Rossi Prize of the American Astronomical Society, and the First Prize of the Gravity Research Foundation, as well as a recipient of Guggenheim, Royal Society, Smithsonian and NAS/NRC fellowships.

His main research interests are high energy astrophysics, cosmology and particle astrophysics. He has made significant contributions in the theory of structure formation in the early Universe; the high energy properties of magnetized neutron stars; the physics of gamma-ray bursts; ultra-high energy neutrinos and cosmic rays, and gravitational astrophysics. He is known for the "Mészáros effect" in cosmology, and for his development (with M.J. Rees) of the fireball shock model of gamma-ray bursts and the theory of afterglows. Thomson- Reuters ranks his work on gamma-ray bursts as number one by citations and number of papers over the 1999-2009 period. He has written over 300 refereed research articles, 140 invited or contributed conference papers, several major review articles, and two books, "High energy radiation from magnetized neutron stars" (U. Chicago Press, 1992) and "The high energy Universe" (Cambridge U. Press, 2010), with over 20,000 total citations. Below is a list of publications, a citation-ranked list of publications and a detailed C.V..