Abe Stroock wins 2007 NSF Career Award
January 10, 2008Assistant Professor Abe Stroock has won a 2007 NSF Career award for his work on the science and engineering of water at negative pressures. CAREER funding represents NSF's most prestigious award in support of the early career-development activities of teacher-scholars who "most effectively integrate research and education within the context of the mission of their organization."
Stroock's group is pursuing research designed to push the knowledge and practical use of liquid water into a physical regime that has been only sparsely explored experimentally and nearly entirely unexploited technologically: the thermodynamically metastable state of liquid water at negative pressure. The team will build on their recent development of a plant-mimetic method to drive liquid water deep into the negative pressure regime. This research has the potential to open a new regime of operation for water management technologies for heat transfer, soil remediation, microfluidic lab-on-a-chip systems for separations and purifications, and electrodes for low temperature fuel cells.
Stroock holds a BA in Physics from Cornell ('95) and a PhD in Chemical Physics from Harvard University ('02). He joined the faculty of the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering in 2003.