building

Dognosis

I co-founded Dognosis with Itamar Bitan to turn what trained dogs can smell into data for medicine, starting with breath-based screening for many cancers at once.

2026

A phase II study of multi-cancer detection from breath

Journal of Clinical Oncology

3,275 participants across Indian hospitals. On a held-out test cohort of 1,502, seven trained dogs combined with a Bayesian model detected seven major cancer groups with 91.5% sensitivity and 90.8% specificity (AUC 0.962).

Read the paper Preprint ASCO podcast In Business Standard

2026

BreathEasy, interim results from six hospitals

Frontiers in Cancer Science 2025, published in Cancer Research

BreathEasy turns canine olfaction into a digital workflow for multi-cancer screening, at under a dollar in consumables per test. Interim results from an assessor-blinded, multi-center study run from October 2024 to June 2025.

Read the abstract

2026

Digitized canine olfaction and multimodal biosensing

Journal of Breath Research

A perspective on where breath-based multi-cancer detection goes when dogs, sensors and models work together.

Read the paper

2025

The first 1,000 breath samples

ASCO Annual Meeting, Journal of Clinical Oncology supplement

Consensus across dogs detected multiple cancers from breath, including early-stage cancers at 85% sensitivity.

Read the abstract

2025

Non-invasive canine EEG, a systematic review

BMC Veterinary Research

Every non-invasive EEG study on dogs to date (22 of them), what they measured and how, and what the field needs next.

Read the paper

2024

Towards canine brain–computer interfaces

Advanced Robotics

The case for, and the engineering of, BCIs for dogs.

Read the paper Free preprint

2024

A sensor-rich olfactory workstation and suit for detection dogs

International Conference on Animal-Computer Interaction (ACI '24)

Instruments for studying how a dog smells with its whole body, not just its nose, grounded in 4E cognition.

Read the paper

2022–2026

Backing

Boost VC, 1517 Fund and The House Fund; the inaugural Accel Atoms X cohort; Emergent Ventures India (three times) and a 2025 Foresight Institute Neurotechnology Fellowship

Dognosis is funded Accel Atoms X Foresight profile All papers Google Scholar

Building

2026–now

Namma Indies

Built with Aswin R

An open, community-built atlas of India's street dogs. Its app, the IndieDex, turns everyday photos into a record of each dog, re-identifying individuals across sightings with a person confirming every match.

nammaindies.org Open the IndieDex Code

2022

DogDoc

Jacobs Institute Spark Grant, and the SCET BMoE Bootcamp

The first pitch for what became Dognosis: disease detection from a dog's nose and brain. Funded by a Spark Grant to build the EEG headset at the Jacobs makerspace, and pitched as a startup at Berkeley's entrepreneurship bootcamp.

Read the Spark Grant proposal

Research

2022

Canine olfaction EEG

Honors thesis, UC Berkeley Cognitive Science. Advised by Prof. Lucia Jacobs, second reader Prof. Frederic Theunissen

Built a four-channel EEG headset for dogs (OpenBCI Ganglion, dry electrodes, a 3D-printed enclosure on a harness) to test whether a dog's surface EEG carries odour-specific signals that a classifier can decode, and ran pilot recordings with two dogs. The thesis proposed "4E", a cognitive model of canine olfaction, and won the Robert J. Glushko Prize for Distinguished Undergraduate Research. The prototype became Dognosis.

Read the thesis Read the thesis proposal

2020–2021

How metaphors frame a pandemic

Berkeley Metaphor Group. With Prof. Eve Sweetser

Studied how framing COVID-19 as a war, a fire or a flood shapes how people reason about health, and how those framings track political polarization, using corpus analysis and online experiments.

RaAM 2021 talk: Choosing source domains to guide metaphoric health reasoning

2020

Spatial language and cognition

Computation and Language Lab (Colala). With Prof. Steven Piantadosi and Dr. Benjamin Pitt

Analyzed how Tsimane' speakers in Bolivia use spatial frames of reference, and designed an online reaction-time study on whether handedness shapes spatial mental representations.

2021–2022

The landscape of psychedelic guide training

Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics

Built a comparative dataset of psychedelic guide-training programs (curricula, certification, cost) to inform the center's own training program.

2020

The digital downgrading of democracy

Technology for Global Security

A cognitive-science account of how digital technology reshapes attention and belief, and what that does to democratic institutions.

2019–2020

Sleep, mood and behaviour change

Golden Bear Sleep and Mood Research Clinic. In the lab of Prof. Allison Harvey

Certified coder of behaviour-change techniques in therapy sessions for a study on sleep and depression.

2019

CRISPR in rice

Innovative Genomics Institute. In the lab of Prof. Brian Staskawicz

Bench work on CRISPR-Cas9 editing in rice, from PCR and gels to plasmid design.

Communities

2020–2022

Psychedelic Science at Berkeley (PsySci)

Co-founder, then Co-President

A student group working to destigmatize psychedelic science and promote harm reduction. Ran the Introduction to Psychedelic Science DeCal, journal clubs, and a 2022 career panel on working in psychedelics.

The DeCal Still taught in 2026

2018–2019