Profile

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Volha Chukhutsina

    • About Me:

      I was born in Ukraine, raised in Belarus, did my PhD in the Netherlands and currently I am trying to solve some big scientific questions in the UK! I am biophysicist/ spectroscopist/structural biologist at a day- an amateur tennis player in the evenings.

       

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      I love to hike and explore the nature.Fishing and mushroom hunting are the things I am doing back at home. Once I moved to the UK, I started to be quite a tennis fan.

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      Being fascinated by the protein structures and broad variety of photoadaptation strategies in photosynthesis upon environmental changes, currently I am studying how photosynthetic bacteria protects from redundant light on the level of single proteins!

    • My Typical Day:

      I wake up and drink my coffee. I am at work at 9am, where I do a lot of lab work and experiments. Then I have lunch with my colleagues and then I am back in the lab. I leave the work place at around 6 pm for a tennis play or meet my friends.

      Some weeks I am working just at my PC to summarise the data and write an article.

    • What I'd do with the prize money:

      I would spend the money to organise a stand at Exhibition Road Festival. It would be a great opportunity to share my research with a broad audience. I was the leading coordinator and organiser of the outreach activity “Life and Light”, which was part of Nature Zone at Exhibition Road Festival 2019 (https://www.greatexhibitionroadfestival.co.uk/event/nature-zone/?backto=whats-on). The money would go for visual aids and materials needed.  The idea for the stand  is to give the public a flavour of how we go about studying photosensitive proteins which movements are the sub-Picosecond or 0.000,000,000,000,1 s. Light sensitive proteins are present in almost all life processes, from Phytochromes in plants allowing them to know which direction the sun is, to the Photoactive Yellow Protein in aquatic bacteria telling them to swim away from harmful UV radiation in shallow water to the Rhodopsins present in the back of your eyes. The aim to give an idea about techniques we use to study these processes, including pioneering Time-resolved X-ray Crystallography, as well as what research questions we are able to answer.

    My CV

    • Education:

      01/09/1998-01/07/2004 secondary education, Gymnasium 58, Gomel, Belarus, 

      01/09/2004–01/09/2009 Bachelor of Science in Radiophysics, major: stochastic processes and systems, Belarusian State University, Minsk, Belarus.
Graduation thesis (2009): Simulation of actin-polymerization for different controlling mechanisms (grade: 10 out of 10, with distinction)

      01/09/2009–01/09/2010 Master’s degree, Department of System Analysis and Computer Simulation, Faculty of Radiophysics and Electronics, Belarusian State University, Minsk, Belarus, Main subjects: physics, statistics

      13/09/2010–31/10/2014 Doctorate at Wageningen University, the Netherlands, supervisor (‘Promotor’): Prof. Dr Herbert van Amerongen; As a PhD student, I participated in the FP7 Marie Curie network “HARVEST”. My focus lay with describing photoprotection and photoadaptation strategies of marine algae and cyanobacteria in vivo: I used “ultrafast” time-resolved spectroscopy that allowed me to follow these processes on the picosecond timescale.

       

    • Qualifications:

      GCSE, BSs, MSc, PhD, Assistant supervisor

    • Work History:

      1/03/2009 – 01/09/ 2011 During my bachelor and master studies I worked part time as a Java programmer.

      01/11/2014–31/01/2018 Postdoc at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Department of Biophysics, with Prof. Dr Roberta Croce. Achievements include the construction of an “ultrafast” picosecond fluorescence spectroscopy setup that allows in vivo measurements on photosynthetic samples with complex morphology.

       

    • Current Job:

      01/02/2018–current Postdoc, EMBO/Marie Curie Research fellow at Imperial College London, Department of Life Science, with Prof. Dr Jasper van Thor. In 2017 I was awarded an EMBO Long-Term fellowship and in 2019 Marie Curie fellowship to study molecular mechanisms and dynamics of photoactivation in various cyanobacterial photosensitive proteins using infrared/visible spectroscopy and X-ray (time-resolved) crystallography

    • My Interview

      • How would you describe yourself in 3 words?

        biophysicist who loves tennis

        What did you want to be after you left school?

        I could not decide whether to be a doctor, vet or something to do with applied physics. But I have found a perfect solution: in my academic career I am answering biological questions with experimental physics. Voila!

        Were you ever in trouble at school?

        no

        Who is your favourite singer or band?

        I love classical music and going to opera. But I also love hard rock bands like Rammstein :)

        What's your favourite food?

        seafood

        If you had 3 wishes for yourself what would they be? - be honest!

        I wish to write up and publish all the articles for which I have collected all the data but have no time up to now to wrap them up. Every scientist has a pile of data they have to look at. I wish I finally sort through my pile :)

        Tell us a joke.

        Joke from my teacher in statistics and probability theory: "What is the probability to go on the street and meet a dinosaurs" "50% -either I will meet it or not"

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