Pepper Mueller

Pepper Mueller (she/her/hers) earned her B.S. in Journalism from CU Boulder and worked for a short time in radio before moving into non-profit work in Florida and upstate New York. She completed her Master’s degree in Social Science: Clinical Sociology from the University of Northern Colorado in 2009.  She won the Outstanding Thesis award for her work and published it under the title, "Regarding Disability: Perceptions of Protection under the Americans with Disabilities Act." She remained at UNC professionally and spent fifteen years teaching courses in Sociology, Leadership Studies, and as an academic coach and generalist advisor for the Student Academic Success Center. She spent her last three years at UNC as the instructor and advisor for the McNair Scholars Program, a federally funded grant program supporting first-generation, low-income, and underrepresented students to design and complete independent research and apply for graduate school. Pepper and her husband moved to Boulder three years ago. They have two adult sons and a daughter-in-law.  In her spare time, Pepper loves reading, live music and theatre, snowshoeing, and cycling. Her real passion, however, is hiking. In 2022, she completed an 80-mile segment of the 500-mile-long Camino de Santiago in Spain, and someday she and her husband hope to tackle the 2,198-mile-long Appalachian Trail.