O'Shaughnessy Ventures Funds Alistair Pernigo's Machine Olfaction Research

Sep 16, 2026
Alistair Pernigo received an O'Shaughnessy Fellowship to develop and test technology that enables machines to detect and interpret chemical signals.

O'Shaughnessy Ventures LLC said in a press release that it awarded an O'Shaughnessy Fellowship to researcher and entrepreneur Alistair Pernigo. He will use the 12 month fellowship to develop a machine olfaction prototype and test it through controlled experiments with academic collaborators.

Pernigo researches systems that let machines detect and interpret chemical signals. Potential uses include robotics, industrial safety and biosecurity.

Pernigo is a research affiliate in the Multisensory Intelligence group at the MIT Media Lab and coauthored the SmellNet paper. The paper presents a public smell recognition dataset covering 50 substances and 43 mixtures across about 828,000 data points.

The fellowship program provides recipients with grants of up to $100,000 and access to the firm's network. Pernigo is the twenty second fellow selected in 2026.

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