Rita La Spina is from Catania in Sicily, where she studied Chemistry. When she arrived in June 2005, she spoke so little English, she would have failed by some distance the University's minimum English Entrance Requirements. However, when it comes to recruiting talented students, one cannot be stopped by mere rules. She is pictured here with a home-built kit for measuring the contact diameter between polyelectrolyte gels and brushes. Originally developped by Lorena Ruiz-Pérez, Rita has further developed this innovation into a very reliable and easy means of measuring adhesion, and has applied it to the switchable adhesion between oppositely charged polyelectrolytes. As part of her Ph.D. work Rita spent five months at the Max-Planck Institut für Metallforschung in Stuttgart in a collaboration with Professor Stanislav Gorb, who is now at the Universität Kiel. Her paper in Angewandte Chemie earned her recognition and a prize for the best student paper of the Polymer Physics Group of the Institute of Physics.
PolyFilm Research Training Network
Max-Planck Institut für Metallforschung Stuttgart
Email: r.laspina_AT_sheffield.ac.uk
Publications
R. La Spina, M. R. Tomlinson, L. Ruiz-Pérez, A. Chiche, S. Langridge, and M. Geoghegan "Controlling network-brush interactions to achieve switchable adhesion" Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 46 6460-3 (2007).
Oral presentations and prizes
Physical Aspects of Polymer Science, Bristol, September 2009 (Invited presentation in honour of winning the best student paper prize of the Institute of Physics Polymer Physics Group)
Polyfilm: Confined Polymer Films, Sheffield, September 2008
Adhesion Society Annual Meeting, Austin, Texas, February 2008
Toward Next Generation Materials International Symposium, Strasbourg, January 2007