Mike Reading is a scientist and inventor; he worked for ICI for 12 years where he became a Senior Scientist and head of all analysis and characterization activities at the principal research department of ICI’s Dulux division. He also had a corporate role as a member of the company Analytical Science Steering Committee.  He has worked extensively as a consultant to TA Instruments. In 2004 he founded with Dr. Azzedine Hammiche and Dr. Hubert Pollock the company Anasys Instruments to commercialize their inventions for Local Thermal Analysis and IR photothermal spectroscopy. He served as its AI’s Chief Technical Officer and was a Professor at the University of East Anglia until 2010. As Chief Technical Officer he led the development and commercialisation of Nano-TA^TM and oversaw the development of Nano-IR1^TM. As a professor at UEA, he led, with Prof. Steve Meech, the development of the first commercially viable technique for nanoscale IR imaging and spectroscopy, this new instrument was the result of an EPSRC funded research project. Building on the previous work of Hammiche, Pollock, Reading and their numerous co-workers, they created the novel combination of top-down illumination, a benchtop laser and a conventional AFM probe to measure thermal expansion. This technique was later commercialised by Anasys Instruments as Nano-IR2^TM (also called AFM-IR). This invention was recognised by the CEO of Anasys Instruments as “an exciting major advance” (final report of EPSRC project EP/C007751/10) and it is now the market leader for nanoscale IR spectroscopy. Details of the founding of Anasys Instruments and the development of Nano-TA^TM and Nano-IR^TM are given below. In 2010 he left both the UEA and Anasys Instruments to work on new characterisation technologies. This led to the foundation of Cyversa.  He is currently the Research Director in charge of introducing a new generation of Local Thermal Analysis and Chemical Imaging techniques.  Mike is also a research Professor at the University of Huddersfield. Mike has won the Royal Society of Chemistry TMG Young Scientist award, the Mettler Award, the GlaxoSmithKline International Achievement Award and is a Fellow of the North American Thermal Analysis Society. His inventions have won a Millennium Award, A Pitcon Gold Award (for the best new scientific instrument of 1998), the 2011 Microscopy Today Innovation Award and 4 R&D 100 Awards. He has published extensively on the application of thermal methods, scanning probe microscopy and photothermal spectroscopy to polymers and pharmaceuticals.