Molecular communication is a bio-inspired paradigm where information is encoded, exchanged, and interpreted through chemical molecules. This paradigm is successfully adopted in nature by cells for intracellular and intercellular communication. The implicit biocompatibility and nanoscale feasibility of molecular communication make it a promising paradigm for engineering the interconnections between embedded computing systems able to not only directly interact with biological processes, but also utilize these same processes as their building blocks, i.e., Nano-Bio Things. Molecular-communication-based systems and networks have the potential to be the enabling technology for a wide range of applications, mostly in the biomedical, but also in the industrial and surveillance fields. This talk will first focus on a broad introduction to this research field, and will survey the main advancements made in the last years. Communications through molecular motors, chemotaxis, signal transduction pathways, and neurons will be reviewed in this talk, with a particular emphasis on diffusion-based propagation of molecular information. The modeling of molecular communication components from biological processes, and their engineering through synthetic biology, will be presented as one of the latest frontiers of this research field.

Massimiliano Pierobon received the M.S. degree in Telecommunication Engineering from the Politecnico di Milano, Italy, in 2005, and the Ph.D. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, USA, in 2013. Since August 2013, he is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL), NE, USA, where he also holds a courtesy appointment at the Department of Biochemistry. He received the BWN Lab Researcher of the Year Award at the Georgia Institute of Technology for his outstanding research achievements in 2011. He was also named IEEE Communications Letters 2013 Exemplary Reviewer in appreciation for his service as referee, and he is the recipient of the 2016 UNL CSE Upper Level Teaching Award. Dr. Pierobon is the PI of the NSF project “Telecommunication Systems Modeling and Engineering of Cell Communication Pathways.” His interests are in molecular communication, nanonetworks, synthetic biology, intra-body networks and the Internet of Bio-Nano Things.