Professor Sir Mark Welland started his career in nanoscience and nanotechnology at IBM Research Laboratories (Yorktown Heights, USA), where he was part of the team that developed one of the first scanning tunnelling microscopes. In 1985, appointed to a Lectureship in Electrical Engineering at the University of Cambridge, he set up the first tunnelling microscopy group in the UK, and in 1991 he began the Nanoscience Research Group.