Sensing

✨ Sensing

Organisms across the tree of life have developed a variety of apparatuses and strategies to probe the environment around them. Each sense (vision, smell, touch, taste, etc) requires the transduction of an external stimulus into something that can be understood and processed by the brain to lead to a response such as a thought or behavior. For example, when the stimulus is a visual scene, photons from the scene are guided to photoreceptors. Upon absorbing the light energy, a molecule within the photoreceptor changes its shape (isomerises), ultimately opening up ion channels, thereby producing nerve impulses that are transmitted to the brain. 

Artificial sensors have much to learn from their biological counterparts, in terms of geometry, fluid mechanics, signal transduction and integration, and more. In our work, we aim to integrate these biological ideas to create new sensors for a variety of applications, from indoor air quality sensing to medical diagnoses.  

Contacts: Haritosh Patel, Jack Alvarenga, Anna Shneidman