Dr. Paule Valery Joseph
Nurse-Scientist · Senior Investigator · Executive Contributor
About
Dr. Paule Valery Joseph is a Senior Investigator at the National Institutes of Health. She serves as Co-Director of the National Smell and Taste Center and Chief of the Section of Sensory Science and Metabolism (SenSMet) in the Division of Intramural Clinical and Biological Research at the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, with a joint appointment at the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders. She conducts preclinical, clinical, and translational studies to improve the diagnosis, prevention, and treatment of chemosensory disorders.
Dr. Joseph’s research integrates clinical neuroscience, genomics, metabolomics, and neuroimaging to characterize individual differences in taste and smell perception. Her laboratory develops chemosensory biomarkers and diagnostic tools to address major public health challenges, including obesity, alcohol use disorder, and neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s disease.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Dr. Joseph co-founded the Global Consortium for Chemosensory Research to coordinate international studies on pandemic-related loss of smell and taste. Her research, showing that recent loss of smell is a strong predictor of COVID-19 infection, has informed public health screening protocols worldwide.
Dr. Joseph’s work has been published in journals including Neuron, Cell Metabolism, Neuropsychopharmacology, and Chemical Senses, and has been featured in TIME, NPR, The New York Times, and other media outlets. Her honors include election to the National Academy of Medicine (2025); a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (2025)—reportedly the first awarded to a nurse scientist in nearly a century of the award; induction into the Sigma Theta Tau International Nurse Researcher Hall of Fame (2024); selection as a TED Fellow (2024); and designation as a Presidential Leadership Scholar (2025). Dr. Joseph is a Fellow of the American Academy of Nursing, the New York Academy of Medicine, and the Transcultural Nursing Society.