Adam Roddy
New York University, NY·Plant Science & Agriculture
Engineers struggle to build materials that are strong, porous and multifunctional all at once. Living tissues manage this routinely, and they do it without a blueprint: large-scale structures emerge from physical interactions among individual cells, a process called self-assembly.
- Fields
Plant Science & Agriculture
Materials Science
Biology
- Topics
leaf development
plant anatomy
self-assembly
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Dec 2027
What they work on
- Develop image-analysis methods to quantify the three-dimensional diversity of cell and tissue structure across real leaves, generating the measurements needed to constrain a developmental model.
- Build a three-dimensional computational model of leaf development that includes all major leaf tissues and reproduces how packed and porous layers arise from identical undifferentiated cells.
- Test how structural variation at the cell and tissue levels changes the mechanical and functional properties of leaves, comparing model predictions against experimental measurements.
- Use the resulting "virtual leaf" platform to identify design principles for self-assembling biomimetic materials with targeted porosity and structural heterogeneity.
More about the research
The plant leaf is a striking example. Leaves look flat but are genuinely three-dimensional organs, built from several tissue layers that range from completely packed to highly porous, all of which grow from the same pool of identical, tightly compressed starting cells. Leaves also carry out nearly all of the carbon fixation on land, so how they are built matters for both materials design and plant function.
Why it matters
Understanding how a leaf's many tissues self-organize from identical cells could point toward manufacturing routes for stable porous materials with tunable properties, without needing to specify every detail of the design. Because leaves perform nearly all terrestrial carbon fixation, a validated three-dimensional leaf model also gives plant scientists a tool for linking internal leaf structure to photosynthetic and mechanical performance.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Jacob Suissa
University of Tennessee-Knoxville, TN·Ecology & Evolution
Test the Drought-Driven Hypothesis by measuring how vulnerable fern leaves, rhizomes and roots are to drought-induced embolism, the air blockages in water-conducting tubes, and linking this to vascular anatomy at architectural, tissue and cellular scales.
James Canary
New York University, NY·Chemistry
Develop mathematical and computational tools that distinguish molecules by their three-dimensional shape and structure, and use them to predict and constrain which topologies DNA motifs can adopt.
Tendai Gadzikwa
Kansas State University, KS·Chemistry·Early-career
Determine the molecular origins of unexpected reactivity observed within and on multifunctional metal-organic frameworks (MOFs), porous crystals with several chemical groups placed close together, using machine learning.
The school
New York University: 72 labs on PI Pages, $1.5B a year on research, 540 research doctorates a year.
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