© HEATHER PERRYAs a graduate student in the field of olfactory neuroscience, conducting what his former mentor describes as ambitiously clever research, Jason Castro felt something was missing. “I wanted to use science to make a connection with people,” he says, not just to churn out results.
In 2012, the 34-year-old Castro accepted a faculty position at Bates College, a small liberal arts school in Maine, in order to “do the science equivalent of running a mom-and-pop—a small operation, working closely with students, and staying close to the data and the experiments myself,” he says. Students who passed through his lab or his seminars recall Castro as a dedicated mentor. “He spent hours with me just teaching me how to code,” recalled Torben Noto, a former student who went on to earn a PhD in neuroscience.
After he arrived at Bates, Castro, along with two computational scientists, enlisted big-data methodologies to search for the olfactory equivalent of primary colors: essential building blocks of the odors we perceive. Their results, based on a ...
