IMSE Doctoral Candidate Prashant Gupta will defend his dissertation “Functional Nanomaterials for Artificial and
Bio-hybrid Olfactory Sensors”

Ultrasensitive, reliable, and rapid chemical vapor sensing is of paramount importance for a wide variety of applications including bio-diagnostics, homeland security and environmental monitoring. Despite decades of extensive efforts, the performance of artificial chemical sensing systems (‘e-noses’) still pales compared to the superior capabilities of their biological counterparts. On several important metrics such as sensitivity, stability, specificity, and tolerance to varying background conditions biological olfactory systems exhibit better performance. On the other hand, chemical sensing approaches that tap into biological capabilities present different sets of challenges, such as confounding behavioral response or sub-optimal neural response, that must be overcome to realize a viable bio-hybrid chemical sensing solution. These challenges constitute the motivation of this dissertation work. We aim to overcome several incessant bottlenecks in both artificial and bio-hybrid olfactory systems. Emerging functional nanomaterials, which exhibit unique optical, electrical, and chemical properties as well as offer abundant structure tuning capabilities, have taken a center stage in unveiling potential solutions for these challenges. Through this dissertation work we demonstrate the promise of nanotechnology in realizing next-generation chemical sensing tools that can outperform the current gold standard techniques in sensitivity, specificity, reliability, and speed.