text: Claire Vallance is a professor of Physical Chemistry at the University of Oxford, Tutorial Fellow in Physical Chemistry at Hertford College, and past President of the Faraday Division of the Royal Society of Chemistry. In collaboration with professor Mark Brouard and others, she created the PImMS (Pixel Imaging Mass Spectrometry) sensor, used for time-of-flight particle imaging and recently featured in the Royal Society of Chemistrys Research Frontiers report. She is co-founder of the spin-out company Oxford HighQ, which is developing next-generation chemical and nanoparticle sensors based on optical microcavity technology. Vallances research spans chemical reaction dynamics, optical microcavity spectroscopy, and applications of spectroscopy and imaging in medical diagnostics. She is also an accomplished musician and triathlete.