Hello!

I am Piyush, a 5th year Mechanical Engineering Ph.D. student working with Dr. Abe Stroock at Cornell University. I am passionate about developing engineering solutions for sustainable interactions between humans and nature. During my Ph.D., I have developed AquaDust, a nanosensor that can provide non-destructive measurement of water stress ranging from micro to field scales in biological and non-biological contexts. I am working with Dr. Missy Holbrook (plant physiologist) at Harvard and Dr. Mike Gore (geneticist) at Cornell to answer fundamental questions relating to movement of water in plants and breeding drought-resistant crops. I am also working with neurobiologists at Cornell to develop tools to better understand behavioral changes in insect pollinators with changing climate.

Ongoing Projects

Tracking water stress at cellular scale

Earth carbon and water cycle is managed by tiny pores in leaves called stomata. What happens underneath stomata still remains elusive. AquaDust enables measurement of water potential and gradients at the terminal end of the traspiration path, allowing us to answer fundamental questions in plant physiology.

Root water uptake and adaptation to drought

"Soil is one of the last great scientific frontiers and the rhizosphere is the most active portion of that frontier in which biogeochemical processes influence a host of landscape and global scale processes. A better understanding of these processes is critical for maintaining the health of the planet and feeding the organisms that live on it." - Nature 2012

Breeding drought-resistant crops

In context of breeding, AquaDust provides new opportunities to measure water stress phenotypes (“traits”) across genetic diversity to target improved water-use efficiency (ratio of carbon uptake to water lost). Holy grail towards finding the water gene(s).

Publications & Patents

Google Scholar

Jain, P., Liu, W., Zhu, S., Chang, C. Y. Y., Melkonian, J., Rockwell, F. E., ... & Stroock, A. D. (2021). A minimally disruptive method for measuring water potential in planta using hydrogel nanoreporters. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 118(23). (Link)(pdf)(Supp Info)

Stroock, A., Gore, M., Pauli, D., Vincent, O. and Jain, P., Cornell University, 2021. In situ sensing of water potential. U.S. Patent Application 16/634,665. (Link)

Jain, P., Vincent, O., & Stroock, A. D. (2019). Adsorption, desorption, and crystallization of aqueous solutions in nanopores. Langmuir, 35(11), 3949-3962. (Link)(pdf)(Supp Info)

Zhang, J., Jain, P., & Diller, E. (2016, May). Independent control of two millimeter-scale soft-bodied magnetic robotic swimmers. In 2016 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) (pp. 1933-1938). IEEE. (Link)(pdf)

Media

Piyush Jain

120, Olin Hall, Cornell University
Ithaca, NY 14850

Email: pj248@cornell.edu