By Matt Swayne

O’Shaughnessy Ventures LLC (OSV), an investment firm that empowers creators, has awarded an O’Shaughnessy Fellowship to Alistair Pernigo, a researcher and entrepreneur based in San Francisco, California.

Pernigo will use the fellowship to research how machines can detect and interpret the chemical signals in their surroundings. Over the next 12 months, he plans to further develop his working sensing prototype and validate its performance through controlled experiments with academic collaborators. His broader ambition is to make chemical perception a practical capability for machines, with potential applications in robotics, industrial safety and biosecurity.

Pernigo is a research affiliate in the Multisensory Intelligence group at the MIT Media Lab, where he works on machine olfaction and molecular sensing. He co-authored the SmellNet paper, which introduces a public dataset for smell recognition covering 50 substances and 43 mixtures across roughly 828,000 data points.  The paper was published at the International Conference on Learning Representations in 2026. He is also a co-founder of Timeless Way, a science and technology lab studying how living and engineered systems perceive and respond to their environments.