Peter Burns was born in 1966 in New Brunswick, Canada. He graduated from the University of New Brunswick with a B.Sc. (first class honors) in geology in 1988, and from the University of Western Ontario with an M.Sc. in geology in 1990. He continued his graduate work at the University of Manitoba, and received a Ph.D. in 1994. His dissertation, under the direction of Frank Hawthorne, concerned theoretical aspects of the crystal chemistry of Cu2+ oxysalt minerals. In 1994 he was awarded a National Sciences and Engineering Council of Canada Postdoctoral Fellowship, which he used to conduct research in mineral phase transitions at Cambridge University from 1994 to 1995, and then in the mineralogy of uranium at the University of New Mexico from 1995 to 1996. He was a Visiting Assistant Professor of geology at the University of Illinois-Urbana from 1996 to 1997. He became an Assistant Professor of geology at the University of Notre Dame in 1997, was promoted to Associate Professor in 1999, and became the Henry Massman Chair in Civil Engineering and Geological Sciences in 2000. He directs the Environmental Mineralogy and Crystal Structures research laboratory, and works with several undergraduate, graduate, and post-doctoral students on various aspects of low-temperature mineralogy, especially the mineralogy of actinides. He has been awarded the Donath Medal of the Geological Society of America, the Young Scientist Award of the Mineralogical Association of Canada, and the Mineralogical Society of America Award. He is married to Tammy, and they have one son, Kelson.