The balloons were the first thing everyone noticed. On May 1, 2018, on The Talk, the hosts surprised Pauley Perrette with a life-size Abby Sciuto built from more than 400 balloons, pigtails and all. It was a week before her last episode of NCIS.
But the moment that stuck came before the balloons. Co-host Sara Gilbert brought up something people had started calling “the Abby effect,” the idea that a goth lab scientist on a CBS crime show had pushed a lot of girls toward careers in math, science and forensics.
Pauley didn’t play it down.
“Yeah, it’s been such an incredible journey, this one little fictional television character,” she said. “It has been enormous and overwhelming for young girls around the world, every country in the world.”
The short answer: Pauley Perrette has long said Abby inspired young women to study science and forensics, and that some went on to earn degrees and work in the field. In 2018, as she left NCIS, she set up two scholarships in Abby’s honor, one at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York and one at her old school, Valdosta State University in Georgia.
A Scientist in Platform Boots
Abby was never meant to be just comic relief. As TV Guide Magazine reported in April 2018, NCIS creator Donald Bellisario built her partly to show that women can excel at math, science and computers and handle themselves around dead bodies. He also wanted to knock down the stereotype that a tattooed girl dressed in black must be trouble.
So Abby got the pigtails, the dog collar, the Caf-Pow and a lab that blasted industrial music. She also got the hardest science dialogue on the show, and she was the kindest person in the building. That mix is what young viewers grabbed onto.
Pauley got thousands of letters and messages from them over the years. When TV Guide asked what she was proudest of from her time on the show, she didn’t hesitate. “Oh, Abby’s influence,” she said. “Young girls all over the world dress like her, they act like her, they talk like her, and they do everything she does. She’s just an excellent role model for everybody. She shows you can be intelligent and kind at the same time.”
“Real People” With Real Degrees
The girls who watched Abby in the early seasons didn’t stay girls. By the time Pauley said goodbye, many of them had grown up, and some had followed Abby into the lab for real.
“It made math and science not only a viable plan for them, but it made it accessible and it made it fun and it inspired these girls,” she said on The Talk, as PEOPLE reported. “It’s been so heartwarming, and it’s been such a real thing. These are real people, who now 16 years later have gotten their degrees in science and math all because of Abby.”
Then she admitted the part that was hard. “I’ve been mourning a lot, the loss of Abby, but also what she means to these young girls.”
Back in 2012, The Washington Post reported that women were leading a boom in forensic science programs, with many students pointing to TV crime shows as the spark. Abby wasn’t the only TV scientist of that era. But she was the one in pigtails who made the lab look like the coolest room in the building.
Two Scholarships So Abby Could Live On
Pauley didn’t want Abby’s influence to fade with the final credits, so she turned it into something solid.
On April 25, 2018, John Jay College of Criminal Justice announced the Pauley Perrette Forensic Science Scholarship, meant for John Jay undergraduates from groups that have traditionally been underrepresented in forensic science.
“I wanted to set up the scholarship in honor of the impact my NCIS character ‘Abby’ has had around the world over the last 15 years,” she said in the college’s announcement. “I hope this scholarship provides an opportunity for a deserving young person to accomplish their dream of acquiring an education in Forensic Science.”
Less than two weeks later, on May 8, 2018, Valdosta State University announced the Pauley Perrette Scholarship for women majoring in criminal justice. That was the day her final episode aired.
Her reason was simple, and it may be the most Abby thing she ever said.
“That makes Abby immortal,” she told the university, “because if young people via this scholarship actually go and become more little Abbys out there, then she literally does live forever and so does her influence, and in a real-life way.”
The Student Who Rewrote Her Notes Until She Knew Them by Heart
The Valdosta State one meant something extra. Pauley graduated from VSU in 1990 with a bachelor’s degree in sociology and criminal science, and she’d planned to fight crime for a living before acting got in the way.
She told the school she was the kind of student who went all in. “All I did was study and study and study,” she said. “I wanted to make straight As. I loved learning.”
She’d copy her notes into spiral notebooks over and over until she knew them word for word. She studied so hard for one big exam that she was accused of cheating. Years later, the same habit got her through Abby’s tongue-twisting science lines. “I take my script. I take a spiral notebook. I write it over and over and over again in my spiral notebook, and by the time I get on set, I know it all,” she said. “It’s exactly what I did in college.”
Her old sociology professor, Dr. Chester Ballard, remembered her well. “She was bright, high energy, curious, and easy to teach,” he said. “She is one of my favorite students across my 32 years of teaching at Valdosta State.”
Her advice to the students who’d study on her scholarship was the same thing she lived by: “never, ever let it be lost on you what a privilege getting an education is. … Take advantage of it. Work hard. Learn everything you can. Dedicate yourself to it.”
Where Pauley Perrette Is Today
Pauley, born March 27, 1969, in New Orleans, played Abby for 15 seasons, from 2003 to 2018. Her last starring role was the CBS sitcom Broke in 2020, and after that she stepped away from acting.
She’s been clear she’s happy with that choice. “I’m not ungrateful for the benefits that it gave to me,” she told HELLO! in 2024, as Variety reported. “But I’m a different person now and I want to be here for it – the good and the bad and the painful. I want to be me all the time.”
The NCIS friendships stuck around, too. Brian Dietzen, who plays Jimmy Palmer, has shared photos from nights out with her, including a rare reunion snap fans loved. And she has called Michael Weatherly “like my brother,” the co-star she made a secret comedy pact with back in the early days.
She kept just one thing from the lab when she left: Abby’s parasol. It was hers all along. She’d bought it on eBay years earlier and brought it in herself, telling the producers Abby doesn’t go outside without it.
The parasol is at her house. The rest of Abby is out in the world, in the women who saw a goth girl in a lab coat solve the case and decided they could do that too.
