Born in 1972, Mark C. Leake obtained an MA from Cambridge, MSc from University of Surrey and did his PhD (2003) at the Randall with Bob Simmons. After postdocs in Oxford and Heidelberg, he established his own group in Oxford as a Royal Society Research Fellow. He is now Anniversary Chair of Biological Physics and the Director of the Biological Physical Sciences Institute at the University of York. He heads an interdisciplinary research team in the field of single-molecule biophysics using cutting-edge biophotonics and state-of-the-art genetics. He is a joint winner of the 2020 Rosalind Franklin Medal, Institute of Physics (IoP), Chair of the UK Physics of Life network and Chair of the IoP Biological Physics Group.