ABRAHAM DUNCAN STROOCK
Cornell University

ENGINEERING PERSPECTIVES ON STRUCTURE, THERMODYNAMICS AND TRANSPORT IN VASCULAR PLANTS

Water plays a central role in nearly all terrestrial processes, both natural and technological. In many contexts (e.g., living tissues, soils, the atmosphere, foods, and synthetic porous materials), water exists in unsaturated phases. Vascular plants exploit these unsaturated states in masterful ways to maintain hydration, feed photosynthesis, and export sugars to their tissues.  In this talk, I will discuss work in my lab to elucidate the physics at play in the water-conducting tissues of plants (in particular, the xylem) and to translate physiologically-inspired designs into useful microfluidic devices for basic science and applications.  As an introduction, I will briefly review the thermodynamics and kinetics of the metastable liquid-vapor equilibria mediated by porous solids, in general.  I will then discuss the particular structural features of plants that allow for efficient and robust manipulation of liquid water in the metastable state of tension (negative pressure).  I will use experiments in simple microfluidic systems to illustrate these concepts and provide insights into the dynamics of liquid transport in nano-scale confinement and of coupled cavitation processes that are observed in both plants and synthetic materials.  I will further present the development of a microelectromechanical device that exploits these phenomena to open unprecedented opportunities for the characterization of metastable liquids and the measurement of the water status in plants and the environment. I will conclude with perspectives on learning from the ingenuity of plants.

ABRAHAM DUNCAN STROOCK is an Associate Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at Cornell University.  His research relates to engineering microchemical process with emphasis on transport phenomena, thermodynamics, and physiology.   Current projects in his laboratory include:  1) the development microfluidic platforms with which to manipulate metastable states of liquid water for studies of the fundamental physical chemistry of water and applications in heat transfer and environmental monitoring; and 2) the engineering of mammalian microvascular structure for studies of tissue-scale developmental processes and applications in regenerative medicine.  He obtained his PhD in Chemical Physics in 2002 from Harvard University.  He has received a MIT Technology Review TR35 Award and an NSF CAREER Award.

For more info: www.chem-eng.utoronto.ca/news.htm

Websites of Interest

• University of Toronto
• Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering
• Department of Chemical Engineering & Applied Chemistry