Profiles of Leading Women Scientists on AcademiaNet.
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Year of election: | 1999 |
Section: | Organismic and Evolutionary Biology |
City: | Bonn |
Country: | Germany |
Wilhelm Barthlott’s scientific research is characterized by numerous contributions in the field of biodiversity, tropical ecology, global mapping of species richness, systematics and evolution of plants, and scanning electron microscopy of plant surfaces.
He is the first botanist who has systematically used scanning electron microscopy techniques to explore structure and functionality of plant surfaces since 1970. One major result is the discovery of the self-cleaning effect of super-hydrophobic micro- and nano-structured surfaces. He developed technical surfaces with self-cleaning attributes derived from biological models, which are now established under the label „Lotus-Effect®“.