After starting his career in a cancer biology lab at Oregon Health & Science University, Petersen made a pivotal decision to shift his focus from molecular mechanisms of individual diseases to population-level health. In 2013, he enrolled in the Master of Public Health (MPH) program at The Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth. It was there that an epidemiology course reframed how he thought about data analysis—not as a way to speed up tasks, but as a tool for answering meaningful questions.

After completing his MPH in 2014, Petersen joined ImagineCare, where he built algorithms to detect patterns in patient data, working alongside Dartmouth and Geisel faculty members Nancy Morden, MD; Ethan Berke, MD, MPH; and Jim Weinstein, MS, DO. The work of translating complex analytics into tools clinicians could actually use felt like a step in the right direction. But a persistent question kept pulling him forward: what should patients and clinicians actually do with the flood of data produced by wearable devices?

That question brought him back to Dartmouth. In 2016, Petersen enrolled in Geisel’s quantitative biomedical science PhD program, focusing on epigenetics in the lab of Brock Christensen, PhD, a leading expert in the field. To handle the complexity of his research, he added a Master of Science (MS) in biomedical data science alongside his PhD. His dissertation explored the connection between biological aging and physical activity in older adults—longitudinal, population-level work that sat at the intersection of everything he cared about most.

As president of the Graduate Student Council, Petersen became a resource for peers struggling with difficult data and uncertain paths. His advice: “Even if your data and research seem like a flaming pile of garbage, it's your flaming garbage. Own it. Make it work. You can become an expert in what it means and discover some amazing answers.”

Nearing the end of his PhD, Petersen co-founded Ucardia with fellow Dartmouth Institute alum Nick Weber, MPH ’19. The company started as a virtual cardiac rehab service with remote monitoring and personalized coaching, then evolved—after the hard realities of selling to hospitals—into a broader platform for patients with cardiometabolic conditions. Today, Ucardia has paying customers and is conducting a clinical trial with UT Southwestern evaluating its mobile cardiac rehab program for heart failure patients with preserved ejection fraction (HFpEF).

Petersen’s core insight is that a single data point is just noise. “By combining episodic data together, we can turn snapshots into almost a continuous dataset, which helps us start to understand what could really be going on.” Context, he believes, is what transforms raw health signals into something a patient can act on.

Reflecting on a career full of unexpected turns, Petersen credits openness to opportunity as the throughline. “The only reason it’s worked is because I’ve tried to say yes to everything. You never know when something is going to work out. But you get out what you put in.”

Written by: Jeremy Martin