Blackburn is a talented experimentalist who has built a formidable reputation on the international stage for the quality, depth and insightfulness of her work. Her work involves trying to unravel the nature and origin of some of the most complex behaviour and ordering seen in materials – properties which originate from the interactions between electrons. Unusual forms of magnetism and also superconductivity are just some examples of new ordering that can occur, but these states can contain subtle patterns which are the key to their understanding. To reveal those patterns one must test the new order using probes which couple directly or indirectly to that ordered state. Blackburn brings the tools of neutron and X-ray scattering to bear in these problems and has developed new experimental techniques and instrumentation to do this.