Ouliana Ziouzenkova

Ouliana Ziouzenkova PhD is an Associate professor in the Department of Human Sciences, Human Nutrition program at the Ohio State University. She completed bachelor’s degree and Master's degree at the State University of Live, Ukraine. She received her PhD degree in Biochemistry from the University of Graz, Austria. She completed the postdoctoral training in School of Pharmacology at the University of Southern California and obtained molecular biology training at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital at Harvard University, Boston, MA. She is an Associate Editor at BMC Endocrine Disorders, and PloS One.

Dr. Ziouzenkova studies fundamental pathways regulating differentiation by vitamin A metabolites. These studies lead to discovery of a hormonal role of retinaldehyde in regulation of metabolic pathways. This metabolite of vitamin A can reprogram fat-storing into fat-burning, known as thermogenic fat tissues. The study in thermogenic adipocytes led to identification of novel proteins leading to weight loss, improve glucose metabolism in diabetes and protect from neurodegeneration. Her studies demonstrated that metabolic differences in women compared to men are largely under control of retinaldehyde and retinoic acid produced from vitamin A that led to obesity in postmenopausal period.

Now her goal is to translate these findings into development of new therapies treating obesity, diabetes, and neurodegenerative diseases, including Alzheimer’s dementia in people and pets. For these translational studies, the research team in her laboratory implemented nanotechnology in collaboration with Dr. Parquette and Dr. Lee from the Departments of Biochemistry and Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at OSU. Ouliana Ziouzenkova is an author of 57 publications and 5 patents, her Google Scholar profile link is https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=BpA44cEAAAAJ&hl=en.