Michelle Peckham was born in 1959, educated Biology at York (BA Hons, 1981) and UCL (PhD with Roger Woledge, 1984). During postdoctoral work with Malcolm Irving at King's College London, she showed birefringence could be used to determine myosin crossbridge orientation. After further postdoctoral studies in UCSF and York, using genetics to study muscle contraction, in 1990, she established her own group back in King's Biophysics under a Royal Society University Research Fellowship. In 1997, she moved to University of Leeds where she has used super-resolution microscopy and Cryo-EM to study muscle ultrastructure and became a Professor of Cell Biology in 2010. She is a past President of the Royal Microscopical Society (2016-2019).