English: Peter F. Barth (Lama Thapkhay) founded Mahamudra Meditation Center, a Tibetan Buddhist meditation group, in California under the guidance of Khenchen Thrangu Rinpoche and served as its director from 1990 to 2015. A student of Tibetan Buddhism since 1970, and having studied with Drukpa and Nyingma yogis in Northern India in 1974, Peter became one of the first Western Dharma teachers encouraged to teach mahamudra when he was given the title of "lama" (facilitator) by Khenchen Thrangu Rinpoche to help students interested in this "path to liberation." Peter has a M.S. in physics from the University of Vermont, with emphasis on neural network modeling and in 1981 solved the Ising model on a closed Cayley tree of arbitrary branching ratio, with related to large neural networks. He was professionally active in software engineering and education until his retirement in 2015.