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Summary: Foreword by Richard J. Stevenson, Macquarie University (Australia): It was long thought that the human nose might be able to discriminate somewhere in the order of 10,000 different odourants. The recent finding that the human nose can discriminate something like a trillion different smells serves as yet another reminder that we have again underestimated the capacity of our sense of smell (Bushdid, Magnasco, Vosshall & Keller, 2014). This volume serves as a further corrective for anyone who should hold the view that olfaction is unimportant in human affairs. The papers presented in this ebook, carefully collated and overseen by Aldo Zucco, Benoist Schaal, Mats Olsson and Ilona Croy, showcase a large number of quite different reasons for studying the applied side of olfaction, and indeed human olfaction in general. The 23 contributions presented here cover a broad range of topics, which illustrate contemporary interests in our field. Although with a strong applied focus, a noteworthy feature of this ebook is the richness of the theoretical perspectives that are developed. These range from considerations of olfactory perception, memory, expertise, and priming right the way through to receptor genetics. These contributions, from many leading experts in the field, will surely shape much of the applied work linking olfaction to disease, which is a further focus of this ebook. In respect to health and disease, the chapters on aging, pregnancy, depression, alcohol dependency and environmental odours, present overviews and rich new data on many contemporary problems, to which the study of olfaction is now contributing. A particularly notable aspect of olfactory experience is the affective impact that odours can have on people and their lives. The ebook covers some particularly intriguing aspects of work in this area, with empirical studies investigating dissociations between wanting and liking, stress reduction in the elderly, mother-infant bonding, and the emotions that different odourants can evoke. This affective line of work is nicely complemented by empirical studies on expertise, the effect of odours on visual attention, and the relationship between particular personality traits and interest in olfaction. The gradual appropriation of methods from cognitive neuroscience into olfaction is also nicely represented in this ebook, with at least three of the chapters reporting data using neuroimaging, including a particular intriguing study looking at recognition of odours in mixtures. Finally, the close links between olfactory perception and sensory evaluation are also reflected in a chapter on wine. I hope that readers of this e-book will be struck, as I have been in reading its various chapters, how much olfaction affects our lives, and how the study of this sense can enrich it.

Summary: This eBook is a collection of articles from a Frontiers Research Topic. Frontiers Research Topics are very popular trademarks of the Frontiers Journals Series: they are collections of at least ten articles, all centered on a particular subject. With their unique mix of varied contributions from Original Research to Review Articles, Frontiers Research Topics unify the most influential researchers, the latest key findings and historical advances in a hot research area! Find out more on how to host your own Frontiers Research Topic or contribute to one as an author by contacting the Frontiers Editorial Office: frontiersin.org/about/contact

Summary: This eBook is a collection of articles from a Frontiers Research Topic. Frontiers Research Topics are very popular trademarks of the Frontiers Journals Series: they are collections of at least ten articles, all centered on a particular subject. With their unique mix of varied contributions from Original Research to Review Articles, Frontiers Research Topics unify the most influential researchers, the latest key findings and historical advances in a hot research area! Find out more on how to host your own Frontiers Research Topic or contribute to one as an author by contacting the Frontiers Editorial Office: frontiersin.org/about/contact

Summary: Burn-out and suicide rates among physicians and scientists in academic medicine are at an all-time high and jeopardize the future of our entire profession. In the last 4 years alone, burn-out rates among physicians have increased by 25%. In a recent 2017 Medscape publication, burn-out rates in Critical Care physicians ranked in 9th place and Pediatricians ranked 13th among 27 subspecialties. Astonishingly, over 50% of the participants reported burn-out symptoms, with clear race and gender disparities. While men generally report higher burn-out rates than women, it is important to emphasize that response rates from women in these surveys were notoriously low and may not represent the complete picture. These numbers are even more dismal for tenured academic faculty at research-extensive universities. In this group, emotional exhaustion (i.e. high burn-out) is reported at 35% with a clear association with age and lower burn-out levels in the older tenured faculty. While no gender or racial/ethnic differences were found in this particular group, higher levels of burn-out were identified in individuals with financial responsibilities beyond a spouse and child. While it is comforting to note the increasing public interest and research activities in this field, successful approaches to ameliorate the burden and consequences of physician burn-out are still inadequately developed. Academic centers increasingly offer some type of work-life balance program to their employees but, unfortunately, these programs are frequently adopted from corporate business models and remain largely ineffective in the academic environment. It should be evident to most administrators that the stressors of academic clinicians and scientists substantially differ from those of corporate employees. Based on these observations and over 75 years of combined experience in academic medicine amongst the three editors of this Research Topic, we collected 26 manuscripts from 22 authors at different career stages and different genders, ethnicities, marital status and subspecialties to identify and stratify common and specific stressors and therapeutic approaches to ameliorate burn-out and achieve work-life balance in academic medicine. We are confident that each reader will identify with at least one, if not several, of the authors' opinions, experiences and approaches to attain greater work-life balance and thereby avoid the consequences of burn-out in modern academic medicine.