LUCA TURIN

Luca Turin was born in 1953 in Beirut, Lebanon, to Italian-Argentinian parents, his father a UN diplomat and his mother a designer.

Brought up in France, Italy and Switzerland, Turin received his French Baccalaureat in 1970. He subsequently studied Physiology and Biophysics at University College London, PhD in 1978. Moving on to work at the CNRS from 1982-92, he then served as lecturer in Biophysics at UCL 1992-2000. He was the CTO of a startup company creating new fragrance and flavour molecules until 2009,. He wrote a perfume guide in 1992, and a second one in collaboration with Tania Sanchez in 2008. He worked at MIT 2009-2011 and at the Alexander Fleming Institute in Athens, Greece 2011-2013.

He will be a Visiting Professor in the Institute of Theoretical Physics in Ulm, Germany from Jan 2014, writes a column for the Zurich-based monthly NZZ Folio and is the perfume critic of Style Arabia.

He is married to Tania Sanchez and has three children, two from a previous marriage.

2018 marks the fifth year of Luca Turin's participation as a judge at the Art and Olfaction Awards. He will judge the second round in the artisan and independent category.