Matthew Cobb is professor of zoology at the University of Manchester. He has a degree in psychology and has studied the sense of smell in maggots and other animals for over thirty years. Since 2004, he has taught a final-year course at Manchester on chemical communication in animals, which is the basis for Smell: A Very Short Introduction. His favorite smells are the back of a baby's neck, and petrichor: the smell of soil in the summer after it has rained. In 2015, he was shortlisted for the Royal Society Book Prize for his book Life's Greatest Secret: The Race to Crack the Genetic Code.
