Wireless Molecular Communication via Odours

The question

Biology communicates chemically long before it communicates electrically. Can odours — diffusing molecules — serve as a deliberate communication channel, and what are the information-theoretic limits when your carrier is a cloud of molecules subject to diffusion and turbulence?

Approach

A two-year research assistantship in Dr Yansha Deng’s group at King’s College London Engineering, modelling and building toward systems that encode and decode information in olfactory signals. The work sits at the intersection of communication theory and biophysics, where the channel itself obeys the physics of diffusion. Paper in progress.

Why it matters

Molecular communication is a candidate for environments where electromagnetic signalling fails — inside the body, underground, underwater. It also closes a conceptual loop with the rest of this research: the same physics of stochastic, diffusive processes appears in how neurons signal and how populations of them compute.