Margaret C. Etter
Margaret Cairns Etter, known informally as Peggy Etter (12 September 1943 – 9 June 1992), was an American chemist who contributed to the development of solid state chemistry for crystalline organic compounds. She is known for her work characterizing and classifying contacts by hydrogen bonds in organic compounds. Her "enlightened imagination, innovative creativity, and unfailing enthusiasm" is recognised as having a "transformative effect" in many areas of organic chemistry. Education and career Etter was born as Margaret Cairns in Greenville, a town in Delaware near Wilmington. Her father, Theodore L. Cairns ("Ted"), was a chemist by profession at DuPont. Etter attained her B.Sc. at the University of Pennsylvania, spending a freshman semester at Cornell (where she met future collaborator Joel Bernstein in the Mugwuamp freshman orientation group), and completed a master's degree at the University of Delaware in 1971 with Harold Kwart. Her Ph.D. research was completed at the University of Minnesota as a National Science Foundation predoctoral fellow under the supervision of Jack Gougoutas. Her thesis and postdoctoral work focused on the study of the chemical and structural properties of polyvalent iodine compounds using X-ray diffraction and spectroscopic techniques. Her Ph. D work was published and still provides a