Affiliations
Member, Monell Chemical Senses Center
Senior Director, Academic Affairs
Co-Chair, Monell Postdoctoral Training Program
Adjunct Associate Professor, Department of Neuroscience, University of Pennsylvania
Education
Ph.D., Neuroscience, University of California, Berkeley
Research Summary
A fundamental problem in neuroscience is mapping the physical properties of a stimulus to perceptual characteristics. In vision, wavelength translates into color; in audition, frequency translates into pitch. Recently, machine learning models have achieved remarkable success at predicting how a molecule will smell from its structure alone. However, we still lack a quantitative framework for olfaction analogous to color science. My research goal is to develop this framework by addressing three key gaps: First, understanding how odor intensity is encoded. Second, discovering the rules governing how individual odorants combine into mixture percepts. And third, understanding the neural mechanisms underlying olfactory perception. Just as color science enabled digital images and displays, we expect this work will one day allow us to digitize, transmit, and design smells with precision.
Keywords
olfaction, psychophysics, cell culture, neuroscience, genetics, behavioral analysis
Representative Publications
Barra B, Pellegrino R, Zhao J, Danilo C, Streleckis A, Reizis T, Rinberg D, Mainland JD. (2025) Mice and humans evaluate odor stimulus strength using common psychophysical principles. bioRxiv. 2025.08.16.669760 [Preprint]. doi: 10.1101/2025.08.16.669760.
Pellegrino R, Samoilova K, Ihara Y, Andres M, Singh V, Gerkin RC, Koulakov A, Mainland JD. (2025) A quantitative framework for predicting odor intensity across molecules and mixtures. bioRxiv. 2025.08.08.668954 [Preprint]. doi: 10.1101/2025.08.08.668954.
Hamel EA, Castro JB, Gould TJ, Pellegrino R, Liang Z, Coleman LA, Patel F, Wallace DS, Bhatnagar T, Mainland JD, Gerkin RC. (2024) Pyrfume: A window to the world’s olfactory data. Sci Data. 11(1):1220. doi: 10.1038/s41597-024-04051-z. PubMed PMID: 39532906; PubMed Central PMCID: PMC11557823.
Lee BK, Mayhew EJ, Sanchez-Lengeling B, Wei JN, Qian WW, Little K, Andres M, Nguyen BB, Moloy T, Parker JK, Gerkin RC, Mainland JD, Wiltschko AB. (2023) A Principal Odor Map Unifies Diverse Tasks in Human Olfactory Perception. Science 381, 999-1006.
Mayhew EJ, Arayata CJ, Gerkin RC, Lee BK, Magill JM, Snyder LL, Little KA, Yu CW, Mainland JD. (2022) Transport features predict if a molecule is odorous. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 119(15):e2116576119.
