Dr. Zlenko was born in Kharkiv in 1993 and had a love for biology and nature from a young age. She graduated with honors from the biological department of the VN Karazin Kharkiv National University in 2015 and went on to complete her Ph.D. at “The Institute of Experimental and Clinical Veterinary Medicine” in Kharkiv. Her work focused on surveillance studies of zoonotic and emergent infections, as well as creating effective diagnostic tools.
When the war started, she was working on tick infections. But all the projects had been stopped. “It requires field trips for ticks collecting, and mines make it impossible to do that,” she says.
During her Ph.D., Dr. Zlenko collaborated with various scientific institutes across Europe, including Bundeswehr Institute of Microbiology in Munich, ANSES in France, and Zurich University. She also worked on COVID diagnostics in the Kharkiv Oblast Laboratory Center MoH of Ukraine during the second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic.
After finishing her Ph.D., Dr. Zlenko decided to improve her bioinformatics skills and entered a biostatistics program. She achieved certification as a SAS programmer in Clinical Trials in 2022.
Now, she would like to go deep into bioinformatics, because it gives her the freedom to work with scientists from everywhere. “Science is freedom,” she says. “I love the perfect balance of creativeness and routine that science gives.”
Dr. Zlenko prefers to stay in Ukraine despite the war. One day, when the conflict will be over, she hopes to give back to society. “I hope I will have the opportunity to teach young biologists everything I know,” she says. “I would really love that.”