Recognizing promise in hearing research: Ksenia Gnedeva wins the 2026 Geraldine Dietz Fox Young Investigator Award

As Ksenia Gnedeva, PhD, was finishing her postdoctoral research in the USC Stem Cell laboratory of Neil Segil, she was initially uncertain she was good enough to secure a faculty position as a principal investigator of her own lab. “Neil responded, ‘What are you talking about? If you’re not good enough, who is? Just do it,’” Gnedeva said. So she did: she was hired as an assistant professor at the Keck School of Medicine of USC, and has now been honored with the 2026 Geraldine Dietz Fox Young Investigator Award from the Association for Research in Otolaryngology, the largest international society for research on the inner ear.

“Even the nomination itself means a lot, since nominations are anonymous and must include a letter signed by dozens of people in your field who believe that you would be worthy of this award,” said Gnedeva, an assistant professor in the USC Caruso Department of Otolaryngology – Head and Neck Surgery and the Department of Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine.

The award recognizes accomplishment and promise in otolaryngology research among young investigators who are no more than seven years beyond residency or postdoctoral training at the time of nomination. The award was named after patient advocate Geraldine Dietz Fox, who went to Washington, D.C., to push for increased research on hearing loss. Because of her efforts, the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD) was established as a separate institution within the National Institutes of Health in 1988.

The award specifically honors Gnedeva’s work in understanding the development and regeneration of the inner ear’s sensory hearing cells, known as “hair cells” due to their elongated projections that detect sound waves. As a postdoctoral researcher in A. James Hudspeth’s laboratory at the Rockefeller University in New York, she was part of the team that discovered that a group of interacting molecules, known as the Hippo signaling pathway, plays a key role in hair cell regeneration in mammals. As part of this research, Gnedeva developed the first-of-its-kind inhibitor of this pathway—the Lats kinase inhibitor—which is now widely used in the fields of stem cell biology and regenerative medicine and sold by Sigma-Aldrich. Gnedeva’s lab has since expanded their research to focus more broadly on understanding the developmental mechanisms that target hair cell regeneration. More recently, her studies have uncovered the gene regulators that enable hair cell differentiation in the inner ear during embryonic development. This work is important because by birth, humans lose the ability to regrow hair cells after damage, preventing hearing regeneration.

Gnedeva is quick to acknowledge the role that her mentors have played in her success as a researcher. She appreciates that Hudspeth and Segil encouraged her to try new things instead of just telling her what to do: “Jim was the type of person who would say the sky was the limit to the kinds of experiments you would want to design—he would never say no.” For example, when Gnedeva wanted to create a small molecule screen, which was far removed from the main focus of the lab, Hudspeth gave her this freedom, which led to the discovery of a first-of-its-kind inhibitor of the Hippo signaling pathway. Meanwhile, Segil helped boost Gnedeva’s confidence and gave amazing advice on how to craft effective grants, essential to receiving funding.

Though sadly both Hudspeth and Segil are now deceased, Gnedeva notes that it is hard to underestimate their impact on her current work.

“It is so incredibly impactful to know that someone else believes in you and your abilities,” she said. “My success as a researcher has always involved standing on the shoulders of so many other people, and without those mentors, I don’t know that I would have been a very successful investigator in this field.”