Melanie Bailey has a Batchelor's degree in physics and a PhD in Electronic Engineering. She previously worked at the UK National Ion Beam Centre (University of Surrey), where she developed new methods to study forensic and biological samples. She has developed methodology for non invasive and rapid medical and drug testing, and the analysis of single cells.

She held an EPSRC fellowship developing multimodal imaging of metals and metabolites using mass spectrometry and ion beam analysis. She is Director of SEISMIC, a new BBSRC national facility for spatially resolved single and sub-cellular “omics” and is Principal Investigator for an EPSRC funded project to bring new instrumentation for multimodal imaging at the UK National Ion Beam Centre for correlative imaging of metals and other omics markers.

She is a member of the international advisory board for the Ion Beam Analysis conference series, International Nuclear Microprobe conference series and the Bragg Institute. She is a Trustee of the Analytical Chemistry Trust Fund and recently obtained a Guinness World Record as “Fastest Marathon Dressed as a Cell” to raise awareness and funding for analytical science.

She is Editor in Chief of the Royal Society of Chemistry’s longest running journal “Analyst”.