Luca Turin
| Luca Turin | |
|---|---|
| Born |
20 November 1953 Beirut, Lebanon |
| Occupation | biophysicist |
| Known for | Vibration theory of olfaction |
Luca Turin (born 20 November 1953) is a biophysicist and writer with a long-standing interest in the sense of smell, perfumery, and the fragrance industry.
Turin was born in Beirut, Lebanon on 20 November 1953 into an Italian-Argentinian family, and raised in France, Italy and Switzerland. His father is a UN diplomat, and his mother is a designer. Turin studied Physiology and Biophysics at University College London and earned his PhD in 1978. He worked at the CNRS from 1982-1992, and served as lecturer in Biophysics at University College London from 1992-2000.
After leaving the CNRS, Turin first held a visiting research position at the National Institutes of Health in North Carolina before moving back to London, where he became a lecturer in biophysics at University College London. In 2001 Turin was hired as CTO of start-up company Flexitral, based in Chantilly, Virginia, to pursue rational odorant design based on his theories. In April 2010 he described this role in the past tense, and the company's domain name appears to have been surrendered.
In 2010, Turin was based at MIT, working on a project to develop an electronic nose related in part on his theories, financed by DARPA. In 2014 he moved to the Institute of Theoretical Physics at the University of Ulm where he is currently a Visiting Professor.
A major prediction of Turin's vibration theory of olfaction is the isotope effect: that the normal and deuterated versions of a compound should smell different due to unique vibration frequencies, despite having the same shape. A 2001 study by Haffenden et al. showed humans able to distinguish benzaldehyde from its deuterated version.
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