Zlata is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Harvard Medical School, Department of Biological Chemistry and Molecular Pharmacology. She is a recipient of National Institutes of Health Research Service Award and Merck Foundation Fellowship Award. Zlata’s interests revolve around gene regulation. At Harvard, Zlata has been studying biological noise – erroneous events due to lack of cellular fidelity. She introduced in the cells new chromosomes, which are not needed for the cellular functions, as a tool to distinguish functional and irrelevant biological events.

Zlata Gvozdenov performed her PhD research work at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, while her PhD degree was officially obtained from the Technical University of Munich in Germany. She studied the effects of the molecular chaperones, protein folding machineries, on the regulation of chromatin remodeling and transcription.

Outside of the lab, Zlata practices and coaches martial arts – she holds black belts in karate and Tae kwon do. She jogs almost every morning and deals with real estate and contractors.