Nina Balke received her Ph.D in Materials Sciences from the Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany, in 2006. After being a Feodor-Lynen Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt foundation at the University of California in Berkeley, she became a research staff at the Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in 2010. Since 2021 she has been an Associate Professor in the Materials Science and Engineering Department and the Director of the Analytical Instrumentation Facility at North Carolina State University. Prof. Balke’s research uses AFM to understand and discover new nanoscale materials’ functionality driven by electric fields for information and energy technology. This includes the study of electromechanical, mechanical and transport phenomena in inorganic materials and across fluid-solid interfaces. Some of her most recent research investigates electro-chemo-mechanical coupling in supercapacitors and battery materials to develop mechanical analogs of current-based characterization techniques which can be applied on local scales to investigate heterogeneities of electrochemical reactions and ion transport.