Professor Elisa Riedo received her Ph.D. in Physics in a joint program between the University of Milano and the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in Grenoble, France. She then worked as Post Doc at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL). In 2003 she was hired as Assistant Professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology in the School of Physics, where she was promoted to Associate Professor with tenure in 2009 and to full Professor in 2015. From 2016 to summer 2018, she worked as Nanoscience Professor at the CUNY Advanced Science Research Center (ASRC), as well as she was a Physics Professor at the City College of New York. Since 2018, she is a Professor at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering in the department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, where she is director of the picoForce Lab. Her research is focused on new scanning probe microscopy-based methods to study and fabricate materials and solid/liquid interfaces at the nanoscale. Highlights from her research are the invention of thermochemical scanning probe lithography, the discovery of the exotic viscoelasticity of water at the interface with a solid surface, and the development of new methods to study materials’ elasticity and friction with sub-nm resolution. Applications of her work range from fundamental understanding of nanoscale matter to fabrication of the building blocks for next generation of electronics, biomedical, sensing, and photonics devices. In 2013, Dr. Riedo was elected APS Fellow, in the Division of Condensed Matter Physics, for her atomic force microscopy studies of nanoscale friction, liquid structure and nanotube elasticity, and the invention of thermochemical nanolithography.