Dr Maxfield Peterson is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the School of Regulation and Global Governance at the Australian National University. He received his PhD from the University of Pittsburgh in 2022, where he conducted dissertation research on the political economy of energy sector regulation.

He has travelled extensively throughout Sub-Saharan Africa conducting interviews with regulators and energy executives. He is currently engaged in research with Dr Christian Downie on the role of bilateral finance in the energy transition. His work has been published in The SAGE Handbook of Research Methods in Political Science, Political Studies Review, and in Centralization: Benefits and Drawbacks (forthcoming with Nova Science Publishing).