Torben Noto

Welcome!

I am a Sensory Scientist at Osmo with a PhD in Neuroscience. I have expertise in the human olfactory system, breathing, emotional processing, and neurodegenerative disease.

I did my PhD and Postdoc at Northwestern University in Dr. Christina Zelano's lab. I enjoy contributing to exciting projects using data science, digital signal processing, machine learning, and my understanding of the brain. If you found this site, I'd probably be happy to talk with you about your ideas!

News

• November 2023: Started as a Sensory Scientist at Osmo!
• September 2023: Our SARS-CoV2 paper just got published in eLife!
• August 2023: Breathmetrics is coming to Python!
• March 2023: Finished my postdoc to pursue a career in industry!
• November 2022: Check out my SfN poster about using exhaled breath to understand Alzheimer's disease!
• August 2022: Appointed to Northwestern University Mechanisms of Aging and Alzheimer's Disease Postdoctoral Training Grant
• June 2022: Watch my public thesis defense here!
• May 2022: GOT MY PHD
• May 2022: Created this website!

Portfolio

	Graphs of social networks Github Lately, I have been interested in graphs. I started by analyzing sample datasets using networkX, but decided to write my own code to design, simulate, and analyze social graphs. I think its pretty neat.
	Finding local businesses by keyword using google maps API Github I learned how to use the google maps API for a job interview and built a tool that finds and describes all businesses within a given area associated with a given keyword. I achieved this by making a series of requests to the maps API to find business IDs and use those to get details about the businesses using the google places API.
	Quantity of SARS-CoV-2 RNA copies exhaled per minute during natural breathing over the course of COVID-19 infection eLife September 2023 Typical Covid tests tell you whether or not you have Covid, not how infectious you are. We invented a method to measure COVID RNA in exhale breath. Over the last few years, we collected 312 samples from 60 COVID positive patients and quantified how much COVID RNA was exhaled following symptom onset. We find that COVID RNA count steeply drops 8 days following symptom onset.
	Kaggle Competition: Predicting Health Outcomes Using Anonymous Characteristics Top 30th percentile of 5000+ submissions This dataset has 60 unknown features that can be used to predict a person's health. It is challenging because classes are imbalanced 10:1 and baseline accuracy is 85%. I used SMOTE, an ensemble of models, and hyperparamater tuning to improve baseline prediction.
	Watch my public thesis defense here! Bask in my arcane knowledge of olfaction, breathing, and the amygdala for a full hour!
	Automated analysis of breathing waveforms using BreathMetrics: a respiratory signal processing toolbox Chemical Senses 2018 Human breathing signals are complex and difficult to analyze. We developed and validated a codebase for respiratory data analysis. Torben Noto, Guangyu Zhou, Stephan Schuele, Jessica Templer and Christina Zelano
	Human Primary Olfactory Amygdala Subregions Form Distinct Functional Networks, Suggesting Distinct Olfactory Functions Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience 2021 Three subregions of the amygdala are part of primary olfactory cortex but little is known about them. We used fMRI to characterize each subregion's resting state. Torben Noto, Guangyu Zhou, Qiaohan Yang, Gregory Lane, and Christina Zelano