His NIDCD-funded research focuses on the regulatory principles governing how olfactory sensory neurons—neurons located high in the nasal cavity—come to express only a single allele of one of the roughly 1,300 possible mammalian odor receptor genes. Dr. Lomvardas’s New Innovator award focuses on possible long-term changes in the activity of genes that may be modulated by neural activity and play a role in long-term plasticity of neurons. Dr. Lomvardas received a Ph.D. in biochemistry from Columbia University.