Abstract:
Plants give life to our planet by pulling critical reagents out of the soil from below (water and micronutrients) and out of the atmosphere from above (light and carbon dioxide). To achieve this feat, they form beautifully structured materials that control the transport and phase behavior of water in extreme regimes. In this talk, I will introduce the biophysical contexts of the water-conducting tissues in vascular plants, map these phenomena onto engineering concepts of porous materials, and discuss a series of experiments we have pursued in my lab to recreate and study these processes in synthetic systems. These studies will include interrogations of flow in nanoconfinement, the dynamics of cavitation in bi-disperse (nanoscopic and microscopic) porous materials, and a trajectory into the doubly metastable region of simultaneous supercooling and superheating of liquid water. I will conclude with the discussion of a technology based on these studies that has allowed us to transition into studying the dynamics of water transport in the native vascular system of intact plants in the field.
Bio: Abe Stroock is a professor in the Smith School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering and adjunct professor in the School of Integrative Plant Sciences at Cornell. He is the PI and director of the NSF STC Center for Research on Programmable Plant Systems (CROPPS). After completing a bachelor's degree in Physics at Cornell, Stroock spent two years in France where he worked in the research division of Electricité de France and completed a master's degree at the University of Paris VI and XI in Solid State Physics. He then returned to the US to pursue a PhD in Chemical Physics at Harvard University. The Stroock lab focuses on manipulating and measuring dynamics and chemical processes on micrometer scales with an emphasis on biophysical contexts. Current efforts in the lab center around the transport, thermodynamics, and physiology of water in plants and in synthetic systems inspired by plant function. He received an MIT Technology Review TR35 Award and an NSF CAREER Award, and in 2023 he became a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.