Su Wins CAREER Award for Developing 'Optical Nose'

BME assistant professor Judith Su has earned a $500,000 National Science Foundation CAREER Award in support of her work to detect volatile organic compounds. 

Su is developing an optical nose “as sensitive as a bloodhound’s and as selective as an insect’s.” The optical nose could be used to detect anything a canine nose could, without the risk of putting real dogs in potentially dangerous situations.

“Your olfactory receptors have been refined over thousands of years of evolution for the purpose of detecting these odorants,” Su said. “People haven’t really been able to use them in combination with sensors before because it’s a challenge to produce them and keep them in working form. When they’re present in your body, that’s the environment that they’re happy in. Once they are outside the body, how do you maintain that in a functional form?”

Electronic noses, or e-noses, have been around for several decades, but even the most advanced are quite limited, with the ability to detect just a few dozen odors by detecting how scents interact with a synthetic polymer coating. They’re also unstable and slow. Su and her collaborators are creating a much more capable alternative by combining hypersensitive olfactory receptors with a powerful optical sensing platform developed in Su’s Little Sensor Lab.