Machines can see. They can hear. They can't smell. Alistair Pernigo is working on that. He researches how machines detect and interpret the chemical signals around them, or as he puts it, making chemistry a native sense for machines. He's 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 SmellNet, a public dataset for smell recognition covering 50 substances and 43 mixtures across roughly 828,000 data points, published at ICLR earlier this year. He also co-founded Timeless Way, a lab studying how living and engineered systems perceive their environments. He has a working sensing prototype. Over the next year he'll develop it further and validate it through controlled experiments with academic collaborators. The applications are robotics, industrial safety and biosecurity. "I'm excited to build alongside people who recognize strange ideas as early signals of what comes next." He's the twenty-second O'Shaughnessy Fellow we've announced in 2026.