Marian Holness studied for both her degrees at the University of Cambridge and, after periods at the University of Chicago and Edinburgh University, she returned to Cambridge in 1997 to take up a teaching post. She was then elected as a fellow of Trinity College and, in 2013, she became the first ever female professor of Earth Sciences at Cambridge. Her interests are primarily in decoding the record of rock history left behind in grain-scale fabrics. She has progressed from working on volatile fluids in metamorphic rocks, through the partial melting of high-grade metamorphic rocks, and is now investigating the complex problem of solidification in both mafic and felsic systems. She has an outstanding publication record and has been awarded many prizes, the most recent is the Murchison Medal of the Geological Society of London which is awarded annually to a scientist who ‘has made a significant contribution to the Geological Sciences by means of a substantial body of work.’