Dr. Volkan Ergin is a translational scientist and faculty member in the Jim and Eleanor Randall Department of Surgery, with appointments in Otolaryngology, and the Board of Governors Regenerative Medicine Institute. His research focuses on developing innovative gene therapy approaches to treat hearing loss and restore hearing.

Dr. Ergin’s research career began with a focus on understanding how neurons develop and maintain their axonal projections. During his PhD and first postdoctoral fellowship, his work uncovered how neuron-specific alternative splicing events regulate axon outgrowth, providing insights into mechanisms underlying axonal degeneration during aging and neurodegeneration. These findings led him to pursue translational research bridging axon biology with gene therapy.

During his second postdoc at Mass Eye and Ear/Harvard Medical School, Dr. Ergin identified novel secreted factors that promote axonal regeneration in the cochlea and used these findings to develop an AAV-based gene therapy strategy for cochlear synaptopathy. In parallel, he identified molecular pathways that promote hair cell regeneration in the adult cochlea, providing new targets for restoring sensory cells after injury.

He subsequently expanded his expertise in the biotechnology industry, where he led AAV capsid engineering efforts for ocular gene therapy and developed variants that outperformed industry-standard vectors.

Over the past decade, Dr. Ergin has developed broad interdisciplinary expertise spanning neurobiology, AAV gene therapy, single-cell transcriptomics, CRISPR, organoid models, therapeutic design, and nonhuman primate studies. His work across academia and industry has resulted in high-impact publications, patents, and licensed development candidates, providing him with a perspective that bridges fundamental discovery and therapeutic development.

At the Ergin Lab, this experience comes together around a central goal of developing gene and regenerative therapies for acquired and inherited hearing loss. The lab investigates how cochlear cells respond to injury and how damaged sensory cells can be protected, repaired, or regenerated following aging, noise exposure, and other forms of cochlear injury. A complementary focus is the development of next-generation gene delivery vectors designed to target specific cell types in the inner ear. Together, these efforts aim to overcome key biological and delivery barriers to hearing restoration and advance new therapies toward clinical translation.