NJIT Alum Sriya Chinthalapudi Joins Osmo, in the Olfactory Sciences
Some might be surprised to learn that a startup company digitizes scents, but making scents made sense to Sriya Chinthalapudi, who in high school became enthralled by a TED talk about detecting diseases from a person’s odor and spent many hours learning more on her own.
She shared that memory in spring 2024 while interviewing for a summer internship at Google-funded Osmo Labs, ahead of her senior year as a computer science major at New Jersey Institute of Technology. After graduating in May 2025, she became a full-time software engineer there.
“I have kind of an untraditional journey in computer science. I actually started out as a pre-med, as a biology major … I loved bio, I loved chemistry, I loved all of those subjects. I also became an EMT,” said Chinthalapudi, who grew up in Edison and selected NJIT and the Albert Dorman Honors College. But after taking a course in bioinformatics, she realized that she preferred the technology side. She transferred to biomedical engineering before finally landing in computer science. “I love math, and I love thinking of new ideas and things like that. So I was progressively working my way more and more toward quantitative, analytical things,” she explained.
Osmo’s splashiest product line is bespoke perfume, and there are less-discussed applications in fields like counterfeit detection and insecticide development. Other companies already invented technology to digitize scents by analyzing the chemical signatures of an aroma’s surrounding air or liquid molecules, but Osmo added expertise in using artificial intelligence to create and analyze such databases. The output can be used to identify or even reproduce a scent, agnostic of the location of who’s asking — Osmo calls this olfactory intelligence and scent teleportation.
As an intern, Chinthalapudi built software to organize unstructured scent data and make it useful for machine learning specialists. Now as a full-time employee, she’s working on software for the scent production side. She cited several NJIT faculty who she found most helpful on her academic journey including Canan Eren and Kamlesh Naik, both lecturers in computer science, along with Bhavani Balasubramanian, a chemistry professor currently serving as associate dean.
Chinthalapudi said she would advise current students to not shy away from whatever subjects interest them, regardless of whether the courses are required or even relevant to their major. “Hackathons, research opportunities, taking classes that you don’t know if you’ll be good at … That’s my philosophy,” she said. “If you’re really interested in something, even if you don’t know how it’ll fit into your life or how it’ll help you, do it anyway. That’s honestly how I can justify doing things that make me happy, whether it’s academic or hobbies and things. Maybe it will help you in some way even if you don’t realize how right now.”
Asked about her dream job, “I’ve always wanted something very analytical, very problem-solvey, like mental puzzles,” Chinthalapudi said. With natural sciences and computation, “I love that kind of work [at] the intersection, where I feel like I'm constantly being challenged.”
Balasubramanian said Chinthalapudi stood out as a non-major in biochemistry. “Although she was a computer science major, she excelled in my class,” Balasubramanian noted. “I invited her to become a tutor so she could continue to keep up with her interest in chemistry and biochemistry.”