Robert Ghrist is the Andrea Mitchell PIK Professor of Mathematics and Electrical & Systems Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania. He is a celebrated researcher in Applied Mathematics whose achievements were recognized by President Bush in 2004 [PECASE award] and by Scientific American magazine in 2007 [Top50 for research]. Among his honors is the 2013 Chauvenet Prize, the highest award given for expository writing in mathematics. As a teacher, he is renowned for illustrating difficult mathematics cleanly and clearly, as evidenced by the popularity of his animated on-line "Calculus: Single Variable" video course.