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K. Domenica Karavitaki, Ph.D. 02

- Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Neurobiology, Harvard Medical School
- Research Associate, Howard Hughes Medical Institute

Research Foci:
Dr. Karavitaki's research focuses on cochlear biophysics and real-time imaging of cellular movements at acoustic frequencies

Career Highlights:
Dr. Karavitaki started her undergraduate education in Greece and then transferred to Boston University where she received a BS and MS in Biomedical Engineering in 1995. In 1996 she joined the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology where received her PhD in Speech and Hearing Bioscience and Technology (2002). For her doctoral work she examined the effects of outer hair cell motility on cochlear mechanics. Outer hair cells are located in the mammalian inner ear and through an unknown mechanism contribute to our extreme frequency selectivity and sensitivity. For her postdoctoral work she is studying how mechanical stimuli are coupled to vestibular hair cells and the biophysical consequences of this coupling on signal transduction. Karavitaki was a co-instructor for HST750 – Modeling Issues in Speech and Hearing (Spring 2003) and a mentor in BioMatrix – a biomedical sciences and biomedical engineering mentoring program at MIT (since 2002). Her doctoral work was supported by NIDCD and the Athinoula Martinos Research Scholarship. She is currently supported by HHMI.