Seminar series news / March 26, 2018

WISB are delighted to announce that Adam Noel, from the School of Engineering here at the University of Warwick, will be delivering a Seminar Series lecture from 1-2pm on Wednesday 4 April 2018. Full details of his talk are included below.

If you are interested in attending, please contact wisb@warwick.ac.uk for room details.

Talk title: Using Molecular Communication to Model Biophysical Signal Propagation and Processing

Talk abstract: Molecules are ubiquitiously used in the human body and other biological systems for signaling, control, and regulation. From the perspective of a communications engineer, these molecules carry information. Molecular communication (MC) is an emerging multi-disciplinary field that applies communications engineering tools to molecular signalling. This field seeks to improve our understanding of biological systems and build networks of devices that could operate in fluids. Potential applications in medicine include treating neurological disorders, preventing the growth of cancerous tumors, and mitigating the impact of other illnesses that arise due to ineffective or unintended signaling. Other opportunities include the advancement of environmental monitoring and the design of lab-on-a-chip systems.

This talk will introduce the MC field and highlight our contributions in modeling, analysis, and simulation. In particular, we focus on molecular diffusion, where the molecules of interest propagate randomly within a fluid. We discuss how channel impulse responses can account for physical phenomena, including chemical reactions and bulk fluid flow. We describe and evaluate communication systems that use a simple modulation scheme to transmit sequences of data. We also present an open source simulation platform that we developed for verifying analysis and exploring different environments. Finally, we discuss several areas of on-going and future work to use communications and signal processing tools to improve our understanding of biophysical processes and determine how to control them at a microscopic level.