Born in 1926, educated at Witwatersrand and Cambridge University, she worked with Wilkins at the MRC Biophysics Unit studying colloid surfaces, such as lipid bilayers. In 1970, she moved to the Frauenhofer Gesellschaft in Stuttgart before being appointed the first female professor in Chemical Engineering at Imperial College to the Kodak Chair in Interface Science in 1975.  In the ‘80s, she collaborated with David Tabor, the founder of the field of tribology, the study of friction. Her research spanned the properties of monolayers of water molecules and the interactions of mica sheets, to the binding of proteins such as Dystrophin with membranes.