Robert Kozol, Ph.D.

Laboratory positions: The Kozol Lab is actively seeking PhD Students and will be accepting new masters thesis students in 2026.

Research: The Kozol Lab investigates how genetic diversity drives changes in brain anatomy and physiology. Specifically, how evolution impacts our brains to create behaviors and how changes (either adaptive or maladaptive) produce novel behaviors or behavioral deficits.

Projects:
Investigating the genetic and neurological correlates underlying odor perception: Our sense of smell drives can influence our social lives, appetite and safety, but we know little about how the brain decodes smell perception. To investigate how the brain encodes odor perception, we have developed a novel model of parosmia (odor perception deficits) using cavefish. Cavefish exhibit attraction to many ancestrally negative odors, such as alarm odors, illness and death. Therefore, we are now mapping how these changes in odor perception are encoded across the brain and investigating what genetic variants drive those changes in odor perception circuits.

Determining how genetic variation impacts drug-protein interactions: Many prescription drugs have been designed to interact with proteins contributing to disease and disorders. However, our understanding of how drug efficacy is impacted genetically are mostly drawn from drug-protein interactions in wildtype genetic backgrounds or loss-of-function gene models. To investigate how silent and missense mutations impact drug-protein interactions and drug efficacy, we have began testing the effect of prescription drugs on cavefish that express natural mutations. For example, we have found that cavefish express several silent mutations in the NMDA NR2b subunit that impact the efficacy of GABA/NMDA targeted drugs. This pilot is a proof-of-concept that we are now using to better understand how genetic variability in receptors impacts the efficacy of prescribed neurological medications.

Investigating opsin expression and function in a cave adapted vertebrate: Vertebrates have light receptive proteins called opsins that can be expressed in both visual and non-visual tissues. For instance, opsins are needed in our eye for ocular light reception, but opsins are also expressed deep in the brain and other tissues, such as the skin. To investigate the non-ocular functions of opsins, we have began analyzing opsin gene expression qualitatively and quantitatively. This work has lead to a remarkable discovery that some opsins in cavefish are upregulated, despite living in complete darkness. We are now determining what role these receptors may play that do not involve light reception, circadian rhythm or cell cycle function in vertebrates. We hope that this will help us understand what non-ocular opsins are doing in humans.