Peter Rask Møller

Peter Rask Møller serves as Associate Professor and Curator at the Natural History Museum, University of Copenhagen, where he leads research in fish taxonomy and biogeography. His work centers on morphological and molecular analysis of fish species across diverse environments including deep-sea, hydrothermal vents, caves, coral reefs, and polar regions. He maintains an active role in supervising student projects and teaching vertebrate and marine faunistics courses.

Dr. Møller's primary research interests focus on fish systematics, particularly deep-sea fish, cryptic coral reef species, cave fish, Arctic fish, and Danish and Greenlandic fish fauna. His work involves reconstructing fish evolution using morphological and molecular data, studying invasive fish species, and developing field methodologies. He has maintained a long-standing commitment to documenting Danish fish fauna through the Danish Fresh- and Saltwater Fish Atlas project (www.fiskeatlas.dk), which began in 2006 with freshwater fish and expanded to marine species in 2009.

His recent publications (2024-2025) demonstrate a strong trend toward interdisciplinary approaches combining traditional taxonomy with modern techniques like environmental DNA analysis and machine learning. These works span conservation genomics, marine pollution monitoring, rare species discovery, and spatial ecology of marine species. The research shows particular emphasis on Scandinavian and Arctic marine ecosystems with growing international collaborations across multiple continents.

As an educator, Dr. Møller supervises Bachelor's, Master's, and Ph.D. projects in fish biology, morphology, and phylogeny, occasionally extending to aquaculture and conservation topics. He primarily teaches in the courses 'Danmarks Fauna - Hvirveldyr' (Denmark's Fauna - Vertebrates) and 'Marin Faunistik' (Marine Faunistics summer course), emphasizing both collection-based taxonomic projects and field-oriented research connected to the Fish Atlas projects.

His work with the Fish Atlas projects has created significant public engagement opportunities, with the project remaining open to all interested participants. Despite the lack of explicitly listed scientific awards in the provided information, his extensive media presence (including radio appearances on P1 about Atlantic Ocean features) and substantial research output (193 publications) indicate recognition within his field.