Promotional poster for the Imperial Bioengineering Department Seminar featuring Professor Jerome Casas from the University of Tours. The topic is Insect antennal architecture and active sensing for enhanced olfaction. Scheduled for 12 February at 4 PM in RSM 2.28. The right side shows a photo of Professor Casas smiling, wearing glasses and a light blue shirt.

PLEASE NOTE: 

  • This seminar is IN PERSON ONLY in room RSM 2.28, Level 2, Royal School of Mines at Imperial College London’s South Kensington campus.
  • Refreshments and the opportunity to network will take place after this seminar in RSM 3.24.

Guest speaker:
Professor Jérôme Casas, Professor of Ecology, Insect Biology Research Institute, University of Tours, France

Seminar title:
Insect antennal architecture and active sensing for enhanced olfaction

Abstract:
In this talk, I will focus on the way insects, either because of the architecture of their antenna or because they move them, enhance the capture of odours. In particular, sex pheromones are emitted in tiny amounts by females, but males can find their way in a turbulent environment over hundreds of meters, a feat which is still unsolved today

This fundamental research also has important applications, from agroecology to explosive detection, and I will briefly describe a new bioinspired project.

Biography:
Having trained in and obtained my diploma in Natural Sciences at the technical school ETH Zürich, I merged my love for the natural world with a thorough classical training in basic sciences, completed by the unique touch of high-tech of this school.   My interests span organismal biology and ecology; behavior and population dynamics of consumer-resource interactions; the sensory ecology of mimetism and flow sensing; locomotion in granular materials and at the air-water interface; mesoscale physicochemical transport and interfacial processes in olfaction and biologically inspired microtechnology. I work mainly on insects. My group is composed of engineers, theoretical and soft-matter physicists, biologists and applied mathematicians working in the field of physical ecology, one of the very few such groups in Europe and within France.  This appetite for truly interdisciplinary work is also embodied in the visiting chair in bioinspired technologies at the LETI in Grenoble (CEA) I did hold for 5 years. A film highlighting my approach entitled ‘Insects: small-scale physics’ is available from: https://videotheque.cnrs.fr/doc=4075?langue=EN.

Physics, mathematics and chemistry are powerful tools, but they cannot replace the knowledge and contextualization gained while observing real living beings in natural conditions. I am proud that one of my papers, published in Nature and relating to visual sensory ecology in a mimetic predator-prey systemsdeals with work carried out in my own garden near Tours. Indeed, a notable feature of my approach is the blending of natural history with both state-of-the-art technology and modeling.

The results of my group are published in top-ranking journals in various domains, from Journal of Fluid Mechanics to Physical Review Letter for physical ecology, from Ecological Monographs to Ecology Letters for ecology, from Journal of Chemical Ecology to ACS Central Science for chemical ecology, and from Journal Experimental Biology to Royal Society Proc.B for organismal biology. When the results are of an interdisciplinary nature, they are published in the few truly interdisciplinary journals, from Royal Soc. Interface to PNAS.

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