Ole Holger Petersen is considered a pioneer of single channel current recording in epithelial cells. In his research, he has characterised several types of calcium-activated ion channels important for fluid secretion. In addition, he discovered hormone-evoked local calcium signals and showed that they controlled both fluid and enzyme secretion. This laid the foundation for his subsequent contributions to the investigation of pancreatitis – a disease where food digestion enzymes produced by the pancreas already become active in the gland itself and subsequently cause its destruction. He has also defined the intracellular receptor mechanisms responsible for alcohol-related pancreatitis. This allowed him to indicate how alcohol activates this self-destruction mechanism and how it can be blocked.

Ole Holger Petersen studied medicine in Copenhagen, Denmark, where he received his doctorate in 1969 and habilitated in 1972. He has been Professor of Physiology and Director of the Academia Europaea – Cardiff Knowledge Hub at the Cardiff School of Biosciences, UK, since 2017. Ole Holger Petersen has been Vice-President of the Academia Europaea since 2015. He was elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 2000 and has been a member of the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina in the Physiology and Pharmacology/Toxicology Section since 2010. He has been awarded several prizes for his work. In 2018 Ole Holger Petersen received the Walter B. Cannon Memorial Award of the American Physiological Society and, in 2020, the Gold Medal of the Academia Europaea. He is also the editor-in-chief of the American Physiological Society's open access journal "Function", launched in 2020.

The Palade Prize is the most distinguished award of the International Association of Pancreatology (IAP) for excellence in pancreatic research particularly for deciphering basic mechanisms of pancreatic physiology/disease pathophysiology. It is named after the deceased Leopoldina member George E. Palade who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1974 together with Albert Claude and Christian de Duve.