I’m Richard C. (Rick) Gerkin, Ph.D. I study human olfaction and develop software for testing scientific models. I’m Head of Neuroscience at Osmo and a Research Professor at Arizona State University.

Most of my current work asks why a molecule smells the way it does. I collect human odor ratings and use them to train and test machine-learning models.

I trained in Neurobiology at the University of Pittsburgh, where I studied plasticity in small networks of hippocampal neurons. As a postdoc at Carnegie Mellon, I recorded from the olfactory bulb and helped develop NeuroElectro. At Arizona State University I began building tools for model validation and working on human olfaction. Later I joined the Principal Odor Map project as a visiting faculty researcher at Google Research. I now lead neuroscience at Osmo.

Selected projects

• Pyrfume collects published odor datasets and provides Python code for loading them.
• SciUnit runs tests of scientific models against experimental results.
• NeuronUnit contains SciUnit tests for neuron and ion-channel models.
• The DREAM Olfaction Prediction Challenge compared models from teams trying to predict human odor ratings.
• The Global Consortium for Chemosensory Research found that recent smell loss was a strong predictor of COVID-19.