In this seminar, I will present the range of work of the nanopore team in the Advanced Materials Group. This will include the development of new nanopore membrane systems, characterisation of the nanopores using synchrotron X-ray scattering experiments and applications of nanopores for charge-based separation, osmotic power generation and biomolecular measurements. The latter now forms a major part our nanopore work and includes the decoding of conformational states in tRNA and machine learning assisted sensing of proteins. In the presentation I will also show the (non-linear) journey that has taken my research direction from high-energy ion-materials science to biophysics and how that changed my research environment.