• Advisors

    • Dolores Bozovic, Ph.D.

      Cirriculum Vitae

      Dolores Bozovic received her PhD in Physics from Harvard University, for her studies of electron transport in carbon nanotubes. She subsequently completed postdoctoral training at Rockefeller University, in the Sensory Neuroscience laboratory. From 2005 onward, she has been at University of California Los Angeles, where she is currently a Professor at the Dept. of Physics and Astronomy and the California NanoSystems Institute.

      The Bozovic laboratory focuses on problems at the interface between physics and auditory neuroscience. Her research specializes in nonlinear dynamics of hair cells, understanding the role of chaotic dynamics and inter-cell synchronization in achieving the nanoscale mechanical sensitivity exhibited by the auditory system. The group combines experimental and theoretical approaches to explore the biophysics of hair cells, as well as their interaction with the neural systems that innervate them. The overall goal is to explain how auditory information is extracted from the environment, as well as how signals emanating from the brain control the dynamics of sensory detection.

  • Postdoctoral Researchers

    • Justin Faber, Ph.D.

      ResearchGate Cirriculum Vitae
      Throughout graduate school, Justin worked in the Bozovic lab, doing a mixture of theory and experiments. His research focused on understanding the nonlinear and chaotic dynamics of active hair cells, how mechanical coupling influences these dynamics, and how these complex systems achieve such reliable signal detection. Since graduating, he has continued to work in the group as a postdoc, now studying the auditory system of the mosquito.

    • Martín Toderi, Ph.D.

      ResearchGate
      Dr. Toderi received his PhD in Physics in 2020 from the National University of Rosario in Argentina. Martín is now a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Bozovic Lab since January 2021 where he studies the dynamics of inner hair cells through optical techniques to elucidate neuronal coding of auditory information. He is particularly interested in high speed fluorescence microscopy and novel imaging techniques with minimum invasive approaches.

  • Graduate Students

    • Kate Holwick

      Kate received her B.S from James Madison University where she studied ultra high energy cosmic rays. Now she is a graduate student in physics at UCLA where she works in the Bozovic lab studying somatic channel blocking and efference on the sacculus.

    • Joseph "Joey" Marcinik

      GitHub GoogleScholar
      Joey graduated from Saint Vincent College (Pennsylvania) in 2018 with a B.S. in Physics & Mathematics. While there, he studied quasars and galactic-center stars, for his physics major, and a mixture of graph theory and game theory, for his math major. During his second year as a Physics grad student, he joined the Bozovic lab where he continues to research. He models hair cell oscillations in the frog sacculus primarily using nonlinear dynamics, sometimes incorporating stochasticity.

    • Jacob "Jake" McConley

      Jake received his B.S. in physics from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he studied active matter theory. He is now a graduate student in the Bozovic lab, where he models how hair cells process and transmit auditory information to the auditory nerve pathway.

    • Charles Metzler-Winslow

      Personal
      Charles received a B.S. in Physics from the Early Entrance Program at California State University, Los Angeles in 2021, graduating magna cum laude and with departmental honors. His undergraduate senior thesis project focused on developing force fields for molecular dynamics simulations. Charles is broadly interested in understanding the properties and behaviors of living systems using ideas from statistical mechanics, dynamical systems theory, and information theory, and he is particularly interested in the effects of efferent activity on hearing system mechanics. In his free time, Charles enjoys hiking in the Santa Monica Mountains, live music and theater, funny political media, and great foods that are easy to cook.

    • Gabriela "Gaby" Muñoz-Hernandez

      Gaby graduated with her B.S. in Physics from the University of California, Santa Cruz in 2019. There she briefly studied the history of dark matter research. In 2020, she pivoted to biophysics and is now a graduate student at the Bozovic Lab were she is conducting research on the dynamics of coupled hair bundles in the vestibular organs of the inner ear.

    • Dzmitry "Dima" Vaido

      GoogleScholar
      Dima Vaido received his B.S. in Physics from Louisiana State University where he studied how cold-atomic gases can be used as an analog model for gravity. He is now a graduate student at the Bozovic Lab where he studies how hair cells encode auditory information and transmit it to neurons.