A warm Mediterranean nighttime breeze wafts across nine-year-old Metin Sitti as he watches a gecko cling to the ceiling above his bed. Innately inquisitive about how insects, birds, and small animals fly and stick to ceilings, he has a dream about the two-inch-long lizard losing its grip and falling into his mouth.

Years later, the Carnegie Mellon researcher and roboticist keeps geckos as pets in his office. Through his work on robot mobility, he discovers that geckos defy gravity, not by means of adhesive on their feet, but by barely detectable molecular attractions—called van der Waals forces—between the animal’s foot hairs and any surface.

For scientific inspiration, Sitti often hearkens back to memories of his Turkish childhood, when he first witnessed the magical gyrations of the gecko, one of nature’s tiny creatures. In his lab, he has developed several gecko-inspired creations: a robot that climbs walls, a robotic water strider that scampers across liquid surfaces, and a robotic hummingbird. He wants to make all of his creations insect-scale and then even smaller, so they can perform miraculous feats. Along with colleagues in his laboratory, he is developing bacteriobots, benign bacteria tethered to molecular substances that will travel to specific sites inside the body with a medical payload for treatment of disease.

For his work in manipulating objects on a molecular level, Sitti recently received the annual Nanoengineering Pioneer Award from SPIE, the international society of optics and photonics.?
Tom Imerito