The Humans of the Wyss (HOW) series features members of the Wyss community discussing their work, the influences that shape them as professionals, and their collaborations at the Wyss Institute and beyond.
You wouldn’t eat a new snack without a nutrition label on the package listing the ingredients, right? Haritosh Patel wants the same to be true for the air you breathe inside buildings. As a Wyss Postdoctoral Fellow, he’s developing an indoor air quality sensor inspired by the way dogs smell, which will monitor for harmful pollutants and enable people or machines to take actionable steps to mitigate the problem. Learn more about Haritosh and his work in this month’s Humans of the Wyss.
What are you working on?
I’m working on Project Air, the first initiative funded through the Wyss’ alliance with Collaborative Fund. We’re aiming to develop and commercialize an indoor air quality sensor.
Currently, we can monitor indoor comfort by detecting factors such as temperature and relative humidity, and then we can adjust the thermostat or use a humidifier to improve the conditions. But sensors often miss pollutants, such as volatile organic compounds that emanate from common household products, including furniture, school supplies like whiteboard markers, and craft equipment like 3D printers. At certain levels, these compounds can cause carcinogenic downstream health effects and respiratory illnesses.
What we’re doing is a real example of biologically inspired engineering. We’re studying how some of the best smellers on the planet, dogs, use their olfactory receptors and are trying to mimic that in our technology, which is why I am being co-advised by Joanna Aizenberg at the Wyss and the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and Venkatesh Murthy at the Harvard Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology. My work with Venkatesh’s group enables a lot of neuroscience and understanding behind olfaction which I take back to Joanna’s group to translate into engineered solutions.
Think about how dogs smell: it’s not a one-time sniff. They’re constantly sniffing, actively pulling air in and out. That motion helps guide odor molecules toward their receptors. We’ve built that same idea into our sensors. Instead of being passive, our sensors have tiny fans that let them “breathe.” They take in and push out air, making them more like a living system. And it’s not just the sensing part we’re mimicking. The brain doesn’t process smells as single snapshots; it looks at how signals change over time. That’s what allows it to recognize and identify specific chemical “fingerprints.” So, we use machine learning models that do the same thing, analyzing time-varying signals to learn and interpret different scents.
What real-world problem does this solve?
North Americans spend approximately 90% of their time indoors, making good air quality essential. A lot of indoor air pollution comes from gases emanating from materials that we bring inside, like rugs, paint, and furniture.
Recently, there has been a push towards green buildings, with LEED certifications and OSHA regulations setting air quality standards to encourage workplaces to maintain a safe environment for their employees and occupants. We know that it isn’t enough to just monitor for comfort; we need to think about how indoor air pollution impacts chronic health. A long time ago, we thought it was okay to eat food without nutrition labels, but now you’d never do that. I think it should be the same for inhalation – we shouldn’t be inhaling compounds we don’t know, which can have negative impacts on our health. Our sensors detect five of the biggest culprits: formaldehyde, benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene, and xylene. In doing so, they would provide people with the knowledge they need to make informed, actionable decisions.
The sensors might be used in people’s homes, and if an unsafe level of one of the volatile organic compounds is detected, the residents can remove the source or ventilate the space by opening a window. In commercial spaces, we could integrate our technology to directly feed signals into HVAC systems, allowing for actionable remediation in response to information from the sensors by adjusting ventilation, humidification, and heating and cooling.
What inspired you to get into this field?
When I was a kid, I loved breaking things apart and rebuilding them. If I got a remote-controlled car, I would disassemble it and try to put the pieces back together. I think that’s why engineering always appealed to me.
I studied nanotechnology engineering as an undergraduate student at the University of Waterloo in Canada. It was a broad, interdisciplinary program that looked at chemistry, biomedicine, electronics, and computer science.
As I got more into research, questions started to emerge around smell. We understand how sight works, with the rods and cones transmitting light wavelengths into our brain stems, which led to the invention of a simple camera. We understand how hearing works, which led to the invention of microphones. We use smell all the time, for example, to check if food is spoiled or to take in the scent of a flower, but we don’t understand it in the same way and therefore haven’t harnessed it for innovations as ubiquitous as cameras and microphones. I realized that by making this link between understanding fundamental science and engineering, we could do for smell what we’ve done for sight and sound.
What continues to motivate you?
The vast number of real-world applications that a universal nose, like what we’re developing, can have is truly motivating. In addition to air quality monitoring, there could be practical applications, such as a smart refrigerator that can predict which food will spoil tomorrow, and fun applications, like enhancing movies with a scent component. Seeing the potential makes me want to uncover the mysteries around smell.
What excites you the most about your work?
The most exciting part is when we see results. I learned from Joanna Aizenberg that there’s no such thing as a failed experiment. When we have a hypothesis, if we see results that don’t confirm it, it just means there’s something deeper that we don’t understand. It makes me want to continue to investigate this and find out what we’re missing. If the results do confirm our hypothesis, that feeling of being the first to discover something new is always thrilling.
There’s no such thing as a failed experiment. When we have a hypothesis, if we see results that don’t confirm it, it just means there’s something deeper that we don’t understand. It makes me want to continue to investigate this and find out what we’re missing
What are some of the challenges that you face?
Conducting a large field study can be challenging due to the logistics involved. This month, we did a three-week study where we’re collecting data 24/7 from six sensors at Harvard’s HouseZero. Anything can go wrong. The power can go out, or there can be problems with the code. Doing all the debugging on the fly can be stressful because you only have a limited amount of time to gather all the information.
Why did you want to work at the Wyss?
The University of Waterloo had a co-op program during the summers. So, while I was an undergraduate student, I interned at a startup Joanna founded, now called Adaptive Surface Technologies, which was commercializing the SLIPS technology developed at the Wyss. Then, I completed a follow-up internship in her lab, where I conducted biomedical research on liquid-infused tympanostomy tubes, which was also a Wyss project. Those experiences familiarized me with the Wyss translational model and the companies that spin out of there.
So, once I was formally part of Joanna’s lab and we finished a lot of the fundamental work for our sensing technology, I was excited to reconnect with the Wyss through what became an Alliance Project.
What is unique about the Wyss? How has that impacted your work?
The amount of expertise, talent, breadth of projects, and scale of impact at the Wyss is almost unimaginable in other places. I see the speed with which you can go from proof-of-concept to first-year Validation Project, to second-year Validation Project, or even Institute Project. Through these programs, you are also exposed to a lot of people that you might not meet if you were in a traditional lab space. The Wyss connects the right people at the right time to help technologies leave the lab to directly help people and the planet. These resources are invaluable to all of my projects.
How do you collaborate with and/or receive support from teams across the Wyss Institute?
Right now, we’re working with the engineering team, Jim Niemi, Hani Sallum, and Jarrad Fallon, on redesigning the placement of the sensors and the electronics in our device. I’ve also worked on biomedical projects where Alex Pauer, who is great at analytical chemistry, helped me understand drug delivery. Emily Stoler, who leads the Sustainable Future Initiative, connected us to Collaborative Fund. We also work with Business Development Team members, like Ally Chang and Alex Li, who have linked our technologies to other areas, such as mapping, monitoring, and detection. Their connection to industry is very valuable. I’m also excited to get more involved with the newly launched Wyss Translational AI Catalyst.
The Wyss connects the right people at the right time to help technologies leave the lab to directly help people and the planet.
How have your previous work and personal experiences shaped your approach to your work today?
Throughout my research journey, and especially during my Ph.D., I’ve learned to think more critically about the why behind every experiment. Early on, I was focused on generating data and solving immediate technical problems. Over time, I began to see the bigger picture: the difference between questions that advance our fundamental understanding of science and those that move a technology closer to impacting people’s lives.
Now, I approach research with both lenses in mind. When I design a study, I’m not just asking, “Can we make this work?” I’m also asking, “What would it take for this to work outside the lab?” That shift has shaped how I think about innovation, not as a straight path from discovery to application, but as a continuous dialogue between curiosity and purpose.
What do you like to do outside of work?
I enjoy long-distance running. I also like playing board games, such as chess, and video games. I’ve been trying to learn the game of Go, because it seems like a natural evolution of chess, but it’s tough. Additionally, I enjoy coding and working on passion projects, such as developing games or recreating apps.
What’s something unique about you that someone wouldn’t know from your resume?
I know 30 digits of pi.
If you had to choose an entirely different career path, what would it be?
I would want a job in game development. You get to create a world and the physics of that world, so you can imagine different laws that would dictate how people might interact with the environment. You have a unique canvas or sandbox to play around with.
What does it feel like to be working on cutting-edge technology that has the potential to have a real and significant impact on people’s lives and society?
We have solutions to a lot of problems already, but we’re missing effective communication between various disciplines. To address Grand Challenges, we cannot work in a silo. To be the one helping to connect the dots is incredibly rewarding.
It’s fulfilling. Fundamental science is valuable, as it advances our knowledge to create these translational technologies, but having a real-world impact is my ultimate goal. We have solutions to a lot of problems already, but we’re missing effective communication between various disciplines. To address Grand Challenges, we cannot work in a silo. In Project Air, we have electronics, signal processing, computer science for machine learning, hardware, fluid dynamics, chemistry, and materials science. All of these areas of expertise are coming together to create a single solution. So, to be the one helping to connect the dots is incredibly rewarding.