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Peter Koch was born in Missoula, Montana on October 15, 1920. He was the youngest of three boys born to Elers and Gerda Koch. Educated in Missoula, he graduated from Montana State College of Agriculture and Engineering Bozeman in 1942 with a mechanical engineering degree. He enlisted in the United States Army Air Corps that same year and served as a pilot in China, eventually reaching the rank of captain. After four and a half years of service, he was honorably discharged and moved on to a job with the Stetson-Ross Machine Company. He married Doris Ann Hagen in Starbuck, Minnesota on October 8, 1950. After six years with Stetson-Ross, he left to attend graduate school at the University of Washington in 1952.

Koch’s Ph.D. dissertation, “An analysis of the lumber planning process,” indicated his early interest in wood technology. After obtaining his doctorate in 1954, Koch taught at Michigan State University for several years and then managed a lumber company in New Hampshire. Starting in 1963, he was the head of the U.S. Forest Service’s Southern Forest Experiment Station’s timber utilization laboratory based in Pineville, Louisiana. Also in 1963, he helped to create several versions of headrig chippers that are now commonly used in most of the world. He published his first book, Wood Machining Processes, in 1964. He received the Superior Service Medal of the United States Department of Agriculture in 1968 for his assistance in the headrig chipper development, his contributions to gluing practices for the manufacture of southern pine plywood, and his system for gluing single-species wooden beams. He was also responsible for the invention or conception of many important developments in commercial wood use throughout the 1960s and 1970s.

Koch was the president of the Forest Products Research Society from 1972 until 1973 and was elected a Fellow to the International Academy of Wood Science in 1974 and the Society of American Foresters in 1982. He published two Agricultural Handbooks, “Utilization of the Southern Pines” and “Utilization of Hardwoods Growing on Southern Pine Sites,” in 1972 and 1985 respectively. He left the South and spent a short amount of time at the Intermountain Research Station in Missoula, Montana before leaving the USDA Forest Service in 1985. He started his own corporation in Corvallis, Montana, Wood Science Laboratory, Inc., that year. His last publication, Lodgepole Pine in North America published in 1996, was the culmination of 13 years of research. He served as a Distinguished Affiliate Professor in the Department of Forest Products at the University of Idaho, a Faculty Affiliate in the School of Forestry of the University of Montana, and as a Concurrent Professor of the Nanjing Institute of Forestry until his death.

Peter Koch passed away on February 14, 1998 in Missoula, Montana from lung cancer.