Anne Peattie ’01 awarded NSF Fellowship
Anne Peattie ’01, from Aptos, California, competed with 5,000 applicants and was one of 900 to win a coveted National Science Foundation Predoctoral Fellowship. The award covers tuition and fees plus a $21,500 stipend per year for three years of graduate study.
"Anne is an outstanding scholar who goes out of her way to take challenging classes," says Kellar Autumn. "She is also an excellent teacher, as demonstrated by her performance as a course assistant in upper-division biology courses; an extraordinarily talented and dedicated research scientist, who published work in her second year at Lewis & Clark; and one of the most modest and congenial students you will ever find."
As an undergraduate, Peattie worked in Autumn’s lab for three years and trained herself in scanning electron microscopy, capturing images of setal adhesion to glass in a vacuum, magnified 150,000 times.
Currently enrolled in a graduate program at the University of California at Berkeley, Peattie is studying the dry adhesive properties of geckos and spiders to help design artificial adhesives with the same properties.
"Self-cleaning dry adhesives are extremely strong per area and have low detachment forces," says Peattie. "Unlike many sticky tapes that are difficult to remove once in place, gecko tape is strong when attached but easily removed because of its orientation dependency."
Future applications for these dry adhesives include surgical procedures involving internal organs, because the compound will adhere when wet, and semiconductor assembly, where using tape would avoid damage now caused when tweezers slip.
—by Pattie Pace and Jean Kempe-Ware
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