Frances M. Ross is the TDK Professor at the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, MA, USA. She received her B.A. in Physics and Ph.D. in Materials Science from Cambridge University, UK, where she became captivated by electron microscopy. She continued this interest during her postdoc at A.T.&T. Bell Laboratories, as a Staff Scientist at the National Center for Electron Microscopy, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and as a Research Staff Member at the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center. Her research is based around the development of in situ electron microscopy techniques to help understand crystal growth, epitaxy, self-assembly and electrochemical and other liquid phase processes. She spends her time outside the lab with family, cats and sailboats.