Peter Kazanzides received the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from Brown University in 1988 and began work on surgical robotics as a postdoctoral researcher at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center. Dr. Kazanzides co-founded Integrated Surgical Systems (ISS) in November 1990 to commercialize the robotic hip replacement research performed at IBM and the University of California, Davis.

As Director of Robotics and Software, he was responsible for the design, implementation, validation and support of the ROBODOC System, which has been used for more than 20,000 hip and knee replacement surgeries. Dr. Kazanzides joined Johns Hopkins University in December 2002 and is currently appointed as a Research Professor of Computer Science. He is a member of the Laboratory for Computational Sensing and Robotics (LCSR) and directs the Sensing, Manipulation and Real-Time Systems (SMARTS) lab.  His research interests include medical robotics, space robotics, and mixed reality and his group led the development of the open source da Vinci Research Kit (dVRK).