Prof. Franca Hoffman, Bonn Junior Fellow at the University of Bonn (Germany), joined Quantum Leap Africa at AIMS Rwanda as AIMS-Carnegie Research Chair in Data Science in October 2020. After completing her PhD. at the Cambridge center of analysis at the University of Cambridge (UK) in 2017, she held the position of von Karman instructor at the California Institute of Technology (US) from 2017 to 2020. Her research is focused on applied mathematics/data analysis interface, driven by the need to provide rigorous mathematical foundations for modeling tools used in applications. In particular, Franca is interested in the theory of non-linear and non-local PDEs as well as in developing novel tools for data analysis and mathematical approaches to machine learning. Her current work evolves around graph laplacians and graph-based semi-supervised learning, gradient flows, calculus of variations, particle descriptions, Bayesian inversion, and theoretical aspects of sampling algorithms. Franca has been sharing her passion for mathematics over the past decade organising educational programs across Africa and across academic levels.