Peter Mucha is a Professor of Mathematics and Applied Physical Sciences. Born in Texas and raised in Minnesota, Mucha moved east to attend college at Cornell University were he majored in Engineering Physics. After a Churchill Scholarship studying in the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge with an M.Phil in Physics, he returned to the States to continue his studies at Princeton with an M.A. and Ph.D. in Applied and computational Mathematics. Following a postdoctoral instructorship in applied mathematics at MIT, and a tenure-track assistant professorship in Mathematics at Georgia Tech, he moved to UNC-Chapel Hill, where he has served as chair of the Department of Mathematics, the founding chair of the Department of Applied Physical Sciences, and is the current Director of the Charis Leadership Program at the Institute for the Arts & Humanities. His awards include a DOE Early Career PI award and NSF CAREER award. At UNC, he was recognized with a Bowman and Gordon Gray Distinguished Term Professorship for excellence in undergraduate teaching and he was named to the inaugural cohort of the Outstanding Postdoc Mentor Award. Mucha’s research includes a variety of topics in the mathematics of networks, including network representations of data, community detection, and modeling dynamics on and of networks. His group’s activities are fundamentally interdisciplinary, applying tools of network analysis and data science in collaborations across the mathematical, physical, life, and social sciences.