Janet Moradian-Oldak
Principal Investigator
Janet Moradian-Oldak is a professor in the Division of Biomedical Sciences, Ostrow School of Dentistry, University of Southern California with a joint appointment in the Biomedical Engineering Department, Viterbi School of Engineering. She has completed her B.Sc. degree in Chemistry in the Ben Gurion University, a master degree in Structural Chemistry, and a Ph.D. degree from the Department of Structural Biology at the Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel.
Dr. Oldak has published more than 120 articles and a few patents. Among many awards and honors Prof Oldak earned the IADR Basic Research in Biological Mineralization Distinguished Scientist Award in 2019. She is the 2019 Fellow of American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). She has served on many scientific organizations such as IADR, AADR, and AAAS, as well as on editorial board of Journals. She is currently the president of ICCBMT and chair of GRC in Biomineralization 2022.
(323) 442-1759
Marziyeh Aghazadeh
Research lab specialist
(323) 442-3192
Rucha Bapat
Postdoctoral Scholar - research Associate
Rucha is a dentist by training and received her Bachelor of Dental Surgery (BDS) from Dr. D Y Patil Dental College, Pune, India. She graduated with an M.S. and Ph.D. in Craniofacial Biology from Dr. Janet Oldak’s lab in 2020. After completing a postdoc in Dr. Michael Paine’s lab at CCMB, she joined Dr. Oldak’s lab in July 2024 for her second postdoc studying the protein ameloblastin and its role in enamel formation.
(323) 442-2701
Natalie C. Kegulian
Postdoctoral research fellow
Natalie C. Kegulian is a Trojan through and through, with B.S. and Ph.D. degrees both from USC. Her Ph.D. dissertation focused on the structures and conformations of amyloid proteins. Still avidly interested in proteins that assemble and shapeshift, she is now unveiling localized structural changes in ameloblastin that occur upon interactions with different partners in the enamel organ.
(323) 442-3192
Erika Bauza Nowotny
PhD student - research assistant
Erika Bauza Nowotny graduated with a B.S. in biotechnology and an M.S. in Biology from Andrews University. In Dr. Oldak’s lab, Erika is working to further characterize an amelogenin peptide-based hydrogel and its biomineralization capabilities on enamel.
(269) 845-5207
Gayathri Visakan
Postdoctoral scholar - research Associate
Gayathri is an internationally trained dentist, passionate about studying enamel development with the aim to develop strategies to better address dental caries, and developmental enamel defects. She completed her PhD training under Dr. Oldak’s guidance during which time she developed an in vitro 3D cell culture-based system to model interactions of the enamel matrix protein ameloblastin with ameloblast cells.
(323) 442-3192
Alumni
Nahid Akhter
Scott Barlow
Saeed A. Bigdeli
Jing Cai
Amrita Chakraborty
Anna Kallistová
Kaushik Mukherjee
Sohaib Naim
Judith Naziri
Yeojung Park
Saumya Prajapati
Qichao Ruan
Garima Sandhu
Edwin Sarkisians
Changyu Shao
