Frances Ross is in the Research Division at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York, and is currently on sabbatical at the National Centre for High Resolution Electron Microscopy and the Department of Polymer and Materials Chemistry at Lund University. Her research interest is the study of surface and interface reactions using dynamic electron microscopy. She is currently studying the growth of Si and Ge nanowires using chemical vapour deposition, the formation of quantum dots, and the electrochemical deposition of copper, carrying out these processes during observation in a transmission electron microscope.

She received her Ph.D. in materials science from Cambridge University in 1989. She then joined A.T.&T. Bell Laboratories in 1990 as a postdoctoral member of the technical staff. From 1992 to 1997 she worked as a staff scientist at the National Center for Electron Microscopy, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. In 1997 she joined IBM as a research staff member and in 2000 became manager of the nanoscale materials analysis department.

In 1999 Frances Ross received the UK Institute of Physics Charles Vernon Boys Medal, in 2000 the Materials Research Society Outstanding Young Investigator Award, and in 2003 the Burton Medal from the Microscopy Society of America and an IBM Outstanding Technical Achievement Award.