Dr Pedersen began his career at Xerox PARC where he lead a research group investigating information access technologies. In 1996 he joined Verity, the enterprise search software vendor, as manager of the Advanced Technology Group. In 1998 Dr Pedersen joined Infoseek as Director for Search and Spidering. In 2002 Dr Pedersen joined AltaVista as Chief Scientist. AltaVista was purchased by Overture which again was later purchased by Yahoo! Dr Pedersen is currently Chief Scientist for Search and Marketplace at Yahoo! He holds a PhD in statistics from Stanford University and a BA in statistics from Princeton University. He is credited with more than ten issued patents and has authored more than twenty refereed publications refereed on information access topics, seven of which are in the Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval (SIGIR) proceedings.