Dr. Paule Valery Joseph

Paule V. Joseph is a nurse scientist, clinician, entrepreneur, and writer who studies how the senses shape human health, memory, and resilience. Born and raised in Venezuela to Haitian parents, she grew up in a culture where food, scent, and memory were inseparable — and those early experiences planted the questions that would later define her scientific life.

Trained at the University of Pennsylvania and Pace University, and holding advanced degrees in nursing, research, and business, Dr. Joseph has built a career at the intersection of biology, behavior, and prevention. She is the Founder and CEO of Anchor Health, a Senior Investigator at the National Institutes of Health, and the co-founder of the Global Consortium for Chemosensory Research, a collaborative network spanning more than 70 countries. Through her laboratory, the Section of Sensory Science and Metabolism, her research examines how chemosensory changes influence nutrition, behavior, aging, and neurological health — and how the body's sensory signals may be among the most sophisticated and underused data points available to medicine.

Her driving question is both simple and radical: what if the senses are not secondary to health, but among the body's earliest and most intelligent warning systems? Working at the frontier of neuroscience, AI, and virtual reality, she is building new tools for personalized sensory profiling — turning what the body already knows into intelligence that medicine is only beginning to read. Her contributions have been recognized with a Guggenheim Fellowship, election to the National Academy of Medicine, induction into the Nurse Researcher Hall of Fame, a TED Fellowship, and a Presidential Leadership Scholarship. Her work has been featured in major media outlets and public forums at the intersection of science, health, and society.

Through her writing and public speaking, Dr. Joseph makes the case that paying attention — to what we smell, taste, and sense — is not a soft skill but a survival one. Her North Star is to reawaken humanity through the science of the senses.