Anne Dell was a chemistry undergraduate at the University of Western Australia before undertaking a PhD at the University of Cambridge supported by an 1851 Exhibition Research Scholarship. She moved to Imperial College London for her postdoc where she rose through the ranks to a Personal Chair in 1991. She was Head of the Biochemistry Department from 1999-2001. She was elected to the Fellowship of the Royal Society in 2002 and was awarded a CBE in recognition of her services to science in 2009. Her laboratory has pioneered the exploitation of ultra-high sensitivity mass spectrometric strategies coupled with micro-chemical manipulations, for the characterisation of complex glycans of biomedical importance.