Nancy Forde

Nancy Roberta Forde is a Canadian biophysicist whose research involves the use of optical tweezers to probe the mechanical forces operating on biomolecules at the scale of individual molecules, including both natural materials such as collagen and artificial molecular machines.

Education and career Forde majored in chemical physics at the University of Toronto, graduating with honours in 1994. She went to the University of Chicago for graduate study in physical chemistry, where she received a master's degree in 1995 and completed a Ph.D. in 1999 with the dissertation Intramolecular Vibrations and Electronically Nonadiabatic Dynamics in Photodissociation Reactions.

Forde was named as a Fellow of the American Physical Society (APS) in 2024, after a nomination from the APS Division of Biological Physics, "for contributions to the understanding of collagen mechanics and the assembly, development, and characterization of synthetic molecular motors; advances in biophysical instrumentation; and scientific leadership in the biophysics community".