About

Abraham D. Stroock is the Gordon L. Dibble '50 Professor at the R.F. Smith School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at Cornell University. After earning a bachelor's degree in Physics at Cornell, he spent two years in France working in the research division of Electricite de France and completed a master's degree at the University of Paris VI and XI in Solid State Physics. He then pursued a PhD in the Chemistry department at Harvard University under George Whitesides. Since joining Cornell in 2003 as an Assistant Professor, he has focused his research on manipulating dynamics and chemical processes on micrometer scales. His lab's efforts include studying mechanisms for manipulating liquids inspired by plants, fundamental properties of liquid water at negative pressure, biophysical processes controlling vascular development and their applications in tissue engineering, and fluid mechanical processes on small scales relevant to chemical processes. His work spans microfluidics, colloids, interfacial science, heat and mass transfer, sensors, actuators, and sustainable energy systems, with applications in bioengineering, biomedical engineering, drug delivery, nanomedicine, and tissue engineering.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Botany
• Atmospheric sciences
• Biology
• Physics
• Statistical physics
• Environmental science
• Meteorology

Selected publications

• Design and evaluation of low-cost, DIY programmable tissue processor for solvent exchange in biological sample preparation

  PLoS ONE · 2026-03-03

  articleOpen access

  Imaging techniques are fundamental tools in biology for examining cell growth and responses to the environment. Many tissues require fixing, staining, and/or clearing before they can be visualized under a microscope. However, these protocols, such as those using propidium iodide (PI), a fluorescent cationic stain widely used across biological specimens including plant, mammalian, and bacterial, often require laborious dehydration and rehydration steps to facilitate stain penetration. These stepwise solvent exchanges, for example, by passing tissues through a graded ethanol series, are time-consuming and manually intensive. While automated tissue processors offer an alternative, they are outside of the budget for many labs. Here, we present an open-source, low-cost (~$400) automated tissue processor that performs sequential dehydration and rehydration of biological tissues, significantly reducing hands-on labor. The processor is made of readily available, standardized parts and includes custom software that allows users to define and save protocols. We demonstrate the use of the processor by automating a multi-day PI staining protocol across multiple plant species, tissue morphologies, and users, and by comparing tissue quality with hand-processed samples. Our design provides a low-cost, accessible alternative to expensive commercial tissue processors, offering a practical solution for a wide range of biology laboratories.

  PublisherDOI

• An Optical Reporting Patch for Spatiotemporal Measurements of Water Activity in Complex Environments

  Analytical Chemistry · 2026-04-14

  articleOpen accessSenior authorCorresponding

  Water activity, aw, is an important state parameter in a wide variety of natural and technological contexts. Existing tools to measure water activity in situ and with spatial and temporal resolutions are limited. Here, we present the development of a composite silicone patch, AquaSheet, that reports water activity as a fluorescence signal. We proceed to demonstrate two modes of measurements: (i) spatially averaged, temporally resolved measurements with a commercial reflectance probe and spectrometer that is appropriate for measurements in both gases and liquids and (ii) spatially and temporally resolved measurements with a custom-built imaging system that allows for tracking the spatiotemporal evolution of a soil drying process. We conclude with a discussion of additional applications, limitations, and opportunities for improvement of the AquaSheet technology.

  PublisherDOI

• Loss of plasma membrane conductance in outside-xylem zone explains non-stomatal control of transpiration

  bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory) · 2025-02-20

  preprintOpen accessSenior authorCorresponding

  Abstract The conventional assumption is that stomatal conductance ( g s ) dominates the regulation of water and carbon dioxide fluxes between leaves and the atmosphere. Here, a nanoreporter of water status at the mesophyll cell surface and local xylem within intact maize leaves documents significant undersaturation of water vapor in the outside-xylem zone (OXZ) and a large loss of conductance of this zone ( g oxz ) at moderate xylem water stress (no turgor loss). The ratio of the resistances (1/ g oxz )/(1/ g s ) serves as a predictive phenotype of undersaturation, non-stomatal regulation of transpiration, errors in standard gas exchange analysis, and an increase of intrinsic water use efficiency ( iWUE ). Cell-scale access to water status reveals symplasmic-apoplasmic disequilibrium and informs a biophysical model that can explain experimental observations quantitatively based on localization of variable conductance to the plasma membrane. This work opens new paths of inquiry into the molecular basis and functional consequences of non-stomatal regulation of transpiration.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• In situ foliar augmentation of multiple species for optical phenotyping and bioengineering using soft robotics

  Science Robotics · 2025-06-11 · 4 citations

  article

  Precision agriculture aims to increase crop yield while reducing the use of harmful chemicals, such as pesticides and excess fertilizer, using minimal, tailored interventions. However, these strategies are limited by factors such as sensor quality, which typically relies on visual plant expression, and the manual, destructive nature of many nonvisual measurement methods, including the Scholander pressure bomb. By automating more intimate interactions with foliage in vivo, it would be possible to inject chemical and biological probes that reveal more phenotypes—such as water stress in response to varying environmental conditions and visible gene expression to measure the success of gene engineering applications. To address this, we developed a soft robotic leaf gripper and stamping-injection method to improve foliar delivery of nanoscale synthetic and biological probes. This allows for nondestructive, in situ, multispecies applications. We used two probes: Agrobacterium tumefaciens carrying the RUBY gene as a reporter system for plant transformation and nanoparticle hydrogels for measuring leaf water potential (ψ). Our hourglass-shaped design enabled the gripper to exert higher forces with reduced radial expansion compared with conventional designs, achieving an injection success rate above 91%. Studies on sunflower ( Helianthus annuus L.) and cotton ( Gossypium hirsutum L.) showed that our method achieved an average 12-fold increase in infiltration areas, with substantially less leaf damage—3.6% in sunflower and none in cotton—compared with the needle-free syringe method. Enabling long periods of successful in vivo phenotyping on both species after precise and safe foliar delivery underscores the potential of the leaf gripper for robotic plant bioengineering.

  PublisherDOI

• Transdisciplinary Collaborations for Advancing Sustainable and Resilient Agricultural Systems

  Global Change Biology · 2025-04-01 · 13 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Feeding the growing human population sustainably amidst climate change is one of the most important challenges in the 21st century. Current practices often lead to the overuse of agronomic inputs, such as synthetic fertilizers and water, resulting in environmental contamination and diminishing returns on crop productivity. The complexity of agricultural systems, involving plant-environment interactions and human management, presents significant scientific and technical challenges for developing sustainable practices. Addressing these challenges necessitates transdisciplinary research, involving intense collaboration among fields such as plant science, engineering, computer science, and social sciences. Five case studies are presented here demonstrating successful transdisciplinary approaches toward more sustainable water and fertilizer use. These case studies span multiple scales. By leveraging whole-plant signaling, reporter plants can transform our understanding of plant communication and enable efficient application of water and fertilizers. The use of new fertilizer technologies could increase the availability of phosphorus in the soil. To accelerate advancements in breeding new cultivars, robotic technologies for high-throughput plant screening in different environments at a population scale are discussed. At the ecosystem scale, phosphorus recovery from aquatic systems and methods to minimize phosphorus leaching are described. Finally, as agricultural outputs affect all people, integration of stakeholder perspectives and needs into research is outlined. These case studies highlight how transdisciplinary research and cross-training among biologists, engineers, and social scientists bring diverse expertise to tackling grand challenges in sustainable agriculture, driving discovery and innovation.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Loss of conductance between mesophyll symplasm and intercellular air spaces explains nonstomatal control of transpiration

  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · 2025-11-19 · 5 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior authorCorresponding

  The conventional assumption is that stomatal conductance ([Formula: see text]) dominates the regulation of water and carbon dioxide fluxes between leaves and the atmosphere. Here, a nanoreporter of water status at the mesophyll cell surface and local xylem within intact maize leaves documents significant undersaturation of water vapor in the outside-xylem zone (OXZ) and a large loss of conductance of this zone ([Formula: see text]) at moderate xylem water stress, without stomatal closure or turgor loss. The ratio of the resistances [Formula: see text] serves as a predictive phenotype of undersaturation, nonstomatal regulation of transpiration, errors in standard gas exchange analysis, and an increase of intrinsic water use efficiency ([Formula: see text]). Cell-scale access to water status reveals symplasmic-apoplasmic disequilibrium and informs a biophysical model that can explain experimental observations quantitatively based on localization of variable conductance to the plasma membrane. This work opens paths of inquiry into the molecular basis and functional consequences of nonstomatal regulation of transpiration.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• A unified framework for hydromechanical signaling can explain transmission of local and long-distance signals in plants

  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · 2025-04-22 · 6 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Local wounding in plants triggers signals that travel locally within the wounded leaf or systemically through the vasculature to distant leaves. Our understanding of the mechanisms of initiation and propagation of this ubiquitous class of signals remains incomplete. Here, we develop a unifying framework based on poroelastic dynamics to study two coupled biophysical processes-propagation of pressure changes and transmission of chemical elicitors via mass flows driven by these pressure changes-as potential mechanisms for the initiation and propagation of wound-induced signals. We show that rapid pressure changes in the xylem can transmit mechanical information across the plant, while their coupling with neighboring nonvascular tissue drives swelling and mass flow that can transport chemical elicitors to distant leaves. We confront predictions from our model with measurements of signaling dynamics in several species to show that i) the poroelastic model can capture the observed dynamics of purely mechanical changes (swelling of distant leaves) induced by wounding; ii) advection and diffusion of hypothetical elicitors with mass flows induced by poroelastic relaxations can explain distant cellular responses observed with gene-encoded reporters of cytosolic calcium concentration and electrical signals; and iii) poroelastic diffusion of pressure changes around local wounds in nonvascular tissue matches the observed cytosolic calcium signals and represents an alternative hypothesis relative to molecular diffusion of chemical elicitors. This framework provides a valuable foundation for assessing mechanisms of signal transmission and for designing future experiments to elucidate factors involved in signal initiation, propagation, and target elicitation.

  PublisherDOI

• A stem water potential model to manage irrigation of apple trees

  Acta Horticulturae · 2025-03-01

  article

  ISHS International Symposium on Models for Plant Growth, Environments, Farm Management in Orchards and Protected Cultivation - HorchiModel2023 A stem water potential model to manage irrigation of apple trees

  PublisherDOI

• A unified framework for hydromechanical signaling: Do plant signals go with the flow?

  bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory) · 2024-10-25 · 2 citations

  preprintOpen accessSenior authorCorresponding

  Abstract Local wounding in plants triggers signals that travel locally within the wounded leaf or systemically through the vasculature to distal leaves. The transmission mechanisms of this ubiquitous class of signals remain poorly understood. Here, we develop a unifying framework based on poroelastic dynamics to study two coupled biophysical processes – propagation of pressure changes and transmission of chemical elicitors via mass flows driven by these pressure changes – as potential mechanisms for the initiation and propagation of wound-induced signals. We show that rapid pressure changes in the xylem can transmit mechanical information across the plant, while their coupling with neighboring non-vascular tissue drives swelling and mass flow that can transport chemical elicitors to distal leaves. We confront our model predictions with signaling dynamics measurements in several species, and show that the poroelastic model captures observed mechanical, biochemical, and electrophysiological signals. This framework provides a valuable foundation for assessing mechanisms of signal transmission and for designing future experiments to elucidate factors involved in signal initiation, propagation, and target elicitation.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Tunable transport in bidisperse porous materials with vascular structure

  Physical Review Fluids · 2024-06-06 · 4 citations

  preprintOpen accessSenior author

  We study water transport in bi-disperse porous structures inspired by xylem tissue in vascular plants (arrays of microchannels interconnected by a nanoporous layer). With various experiments (high pressure-driven flow, spontaneous imbibition, transpiration-driven flow at negative pressure), we show that transport rates can be tuned by varying the shape of the microchannels. Even with a fixed shape, spontaneous imbibition behaves very differently depending on sample preparation (air-filled vs. evacuated), because of a dramatic change of transport mechanism in the microchannels. We provide analytical (effective medium) approaches and numerical simulations to rationalize these observations.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Recent grants

• PFI:AIR - TT: Development of Tools and Methods for Extended Maturity Analysis of Concrete

  NSF · $200k · 2015–2017

• SST: Optimizing Microfluidic Transport and Magnetic Sensing for Detection of Detection of Pseudomonas Syringae

  NSF · $746k · 2005–2009

• CAREER: Fundamental Studies to Advance the Science and Engineering of Water at Negative Pressures

  NSF · $400k · 2008–2013

• International Collaboration in Chemistry: Origins of the anomalous thermodynamics and dynamics of metastable liquid water

  NSF · $376k · 2009–2013

• STC: Center for Research On Programmable Plant Systems

  NSF · $24.5M · 2021–2026

Frequent coauthors

• George M. Whitesides

  35 shared

• Olivier Vincent

  27 shared

• Nakwon Choi

  Korean Association Of Science and Technology Studies

  17 shared

• Donald L. Koch

  17 shared

• Ying Zheng

  Yangzhou University

  15 shared

• Claudia Fischbach

  Cornell University

  15 shared

• David A. Sessoms

  Cornell University

  15 shared

• Pierre Lidon

  Université de Bordeaux

  15 shared

Education

• PhD, Chemistry

  Harvard University

  2002

• BA, Physics

  Cornell University

  1997

Awards & honors

• Henry and Camille Dreyfus New faculty award (2003)
• Office of Naval Research's Young Investigator award (2004)
• 3M Non-Tenured Faculty Award (2006)
• Beckman Foundation Young Investigator Award (2006)
• MIT Technology Review's TR35 list of top innovators under 35…