A lab on a chip: using nano-plasmonics tongues for building miniaturized ecosystem sensors

Sustainability and human wellbeing depend on resources from marine and freshwater systems, and to monitor how they are changing, a range of observations are needed. In situ measurements of physical water properties like temperature and salinity are almost trivial, but higher-level sensors that address biogeochemical properties, or even trophic levels, are often complicated, expensive or need expert operation. Therefore, there is a desperate need for instrumentation that can deliver in-situ, real time information from physics to biology in aquatic ecosystems supporting researchers, industry, policy makers and the public. A recent technological development of ours that could address this problem is the realisation of a passive "artificial tongue" device capable of detecting and classifying a myriad of complex chemical mixtures in real-time.

In this project, we will use this new class of nano-scale sensor in an aquatic environment for the first time. Through the development of a portable tongue device specifically tuned for aquatic field measurements you will aim to demonstrate a versatile, low- power, high-resolution optical sensor array capable of classifying and identifying a range of physical, biological and ecosystem indicators.