Entrepreneurship
On June 30th 2023, Dr. Mershin retired from academia to launch RealNose.ai after 26 years of being academic PI -the last 19 leading research at MIT as the Director of the MIT Label Free Research Group (2004-2023).
He co-founded and is now Chief Science Officer of machine olfaction Prostate Cancer diagnostic startup RealNose.ai.
He holds patents in the fields of biosensing (leading work in machine olfaction: US Patent US9140677B2), signal processing, microfluidics, energy harvesting, synthetic biology, AgTech/mycotecture, and medical devices (EEG neurofeedback and electromeridian diagnostics).
He has served as science advisor to several MIT 100K business idea competition teams including finalists, holds the second place record for most MIT teams in a year.
In 2015 he led the AntiDark team to win the MIT Launch challenge and the Mass Challenge Competition Startup Incubator, and in 2017 he mentored winning entry to the Cornell Entrepreneurship Competition (MindShift). The Self-Calibrating Protocol (SCP) he co-invented was used in 2015 to make the world's first practical pain sensor, and in 2016 won the ACM award for most innovative technology allowing pain sensing via inexpensive, consumer-grade, wearable, wireless EEG sensors coupled to smartphones. He is co-founder of Ninurta.com and MycoHab.com which has been highlighted by the MIT Sloan Ecosystem.
Outreach
In 2021, he co-founded and is president of the OsmoCosm.org Public Benefit Foundation (MA-registered 501 c 3), running the annual Global Machine Olfaction Technologies Conference each October at MIT.
He is the co-founder and director emeritus of the international Molecular Frontiers Inquiry Prize (MFIP) a.k.a “Kid Nobel” - (www.molecularfrontiers.org). The MFIP was founded in 2008 is awarded annually at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm to the most intriguing scientific questions posed by humans under 19 years old. Winners are determined by a jury selected from a panel of eminent scientists including thirteen Nobel laureates. This is the world’s first known prize focused on fostering curiosity and awarded for asking good questions. He gave the inaugural bio keynote Princeton Envision in 2016 and has since been advising the series and is one of 2017 TEDx Beacon St invited speakers and spoke at TEDx Athens.
He co-organized the Membrane Protein Frontiers Conference and the MIT Bits to Bio Conference and chaired the speaker selection committee of the MIT Label Free Research Guest Lecture Series (e.g. Olfaction, Evolution). He co-founded and led the Hellenic Business Network Big Idea Competition, raising funding for and mentoring early local startups enabling them to succeed in bringing to market: lightweight vertical wind turbines, multilingual translation technologies and collaborative law-writing software.
He volunteers on the advisory board of Zino Ventures a fund focused on bringing the lab-to-market lessons learned from MIT to bear on innovative international investment strategies and technology development in New Zealand and also volunteers as advisor to BioFab.