Carl Zeiss Postdoctoral Fellowship for Oleksandra Kukharenko

We congratulate Oleksandra Kukharenko (Postdoctoral Fellow/Dept. of Chemistry) on securing a Carl Zeiss Postdoctoral Fellowship!

Oleksandra Kukharenko has been awarded a Carl Zeiss postdoctoral fellowship for two years. The fellowship will start September 1st, 2017 and covers her postdoctoral position plus travel allowances and a student assistant, in total 78 000 Euro per year.

During her fellowship, Oleksandra will be working on the research project " Quantitative Analysis of Linker Histones Ubiquitylation based on Molecular Simulation Data". This project focuses on the development and application of computational methods and mathematical tools to study functional conformational changes of complex biological systems, in particular the influence of mono-ubiquitylation in linker histones on DNA interaction and their ability to form higher order chromatin structures. Investigation of biological systems of this size with classical simulations is limited due to the timescale problem which becomes substantially large and cannot be addressed straightforwardly. Therefore the use of different resolution levels (multiscale models) in combination with novel machine learning techniques can help to simulate efficiently functional conformational changes of the ubiquitinated histone and to characterize its phase space. Furthermore, obtained kinetic and thermodynamic information will be used to model the behavior of ubiquitinated histone. Comprehensive information of this kind will be of fundamental importance in the interpretation of experimental data and the planning of future experiments. In addition, developed and modified theoretical methods from this project will be used for the investigation of other multi-body systems.