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Smell, memory and emotion have a reciprocal relationship. Our experience of smell is steeped in memory and emotional context. Likewise, these cognitive processes are supported by our brain’s olfactory system. This relationship suggests that maintaining olfactory health can benefit overall cognitive well-being. Simple, low-tech methods may help enhance our sense of smell, potentially improving cognition.

The IAO is thrilled to welcome Dr. Leslie M. Kay for a lecture covering her recent research in the neuroscience of smell, in the latest lecture in our Olfactory Research Notes series. Olfactory Research Notes is a lecture series that presents important research done in olfaction, directly from the scientists, academics and researchers who do it.

Dr. Leslie M. Kay received her BA in Liberal Arts from St. John’s College in Santa Fe, New Mexico and then worked for the original GenBank project at Los Alamos National Laboratory. She was a programmer/analyst in business applications for a number of years in the mid- to late eighties, and then returned to graduate school at UC Berkeley to complete my PhD in Biophysics working with Walter J. Freeman III. She did her postdoctoral research in the laboratory of Gilles Laurent at the California Institute of Technology, where she studied olfactory bulb mitral cell responses to changes in odor context. She has been at The University of Chicago since 2000, and her laboratory studies the effects of behavioral context on olfactory and limbic system neurophysiology. At her lab, they focus on the mechanisms and functions associated with intra- and inter-regional oscillatory cooperativity primarily in the rat olfactory and limbic systems.