Paule Valery Joseph, Ph.D., FNP-BC

Paule V. Joseph, PhD, MSN, FNP-BC, MBA, FAAN, was born in Guatire, Venezuela, and immigrated to the United States at seventeen. She began her nursing education at Hostos Community College in the Bronx before earning a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania. Her journey from a Venezuelan childhood to the National Institutes of Health has shaped a career devoted to understanding one of our most overlooked senses and what it reveals about how we live, care, and age.

Dr. Joseph is a Senior Investigator and Chief of the Section on Sensory Science and Metabolism at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and Founding Co-Director of the NIH National Smell and Taste Center. Her research investigates smell and taste as early indicators of brain health, neurodegenerative disease, metabolic disorders, alcohol use disorder, and healthy aging. During the COVID-19 pandemic, she co-founded the Global Consortium for Chemosensory Research, bringing together more than 770 scientists across 71 countries to better understand the global loss of smell and taste. She is an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine, a Guggenheim Fellow, a TED Fellow, and a Presidential Leadership Scholar.

Before leading her own research program, Dr. Joseph spent more than two decades caring for patients as a nurse and nurse practitioner in emergency departments, rehabilitation units, long-term care settings, and outpatient clinics. Again and again, she witnessed something medicine often overlooked: subtle changes in smell and taste quietly preceded changes in nutrition, independence, cognition, and quality of life. Those observations became the foundation of her scientific work.

Her work became deeply personal when her mother-in-law, Elida, began losing those same senses years before being diagnosed with frontotemporal dementia. Walking alongside her family through that journey deepened Dr. Joseph’s understanding of smell—not simply as a sensory experience, but as a window into identity, memory, connection, and what patients and families begin to lose long before words fail.

Today, Dr. Joseph advocates recognizing the sense of smell as a vital sign. Her broader mission is to help people rediscover the power of the senses as a gateway to earlier diagnosis, more compassionate care, and richer conversations about aging, caregiving, and serious illness. Her forthcoming book, Common Scents, will be published by Hay House. She teaches taste and sensory perception at the Culinary Institute of America, and her TED Talk, Why Smell Matters More Than You Think, has reached audiences around the world through translations in multiple languages.

She believes that paying attention to our senses can help us detect disease earlier, care for one another more compassionately, and preserve the moments that make us feel most human.