Q&A: Oleksandra Romanyshyn on helping Ukrainian scientists

Last month, the American Physical Society March Meeting featured a session devoted to the current war in Ukraine. After opening statements from APS CEO Jonathan Bagger condemning Russia’s invasion, researchers in the audience shared their stories and concerns about the situation in Ukraine. One of those who spoke up was Stony Brook University graduate student Oleksandra Romanyshyn .

Two years ago, Romanyshyn started the Chornobryvtsi Scholarship to offer financial support to Ukrainian undergraduate and graduate students in science. (Chornobryvtsi means “marigold” in Ukrainian.) Although she had moved from her hometown of Lviv, Ukraine, to New York in 2017 to study biomedical engineering, she wanted to show students back home that they didn’t need to leave to do research.

The stipend wasn’t the first time that Romanyshyn was inspired to help her country. In 2014 protests by Russia-backed separatists in the Donbas region of Ukraine motivated her to become a translator for the Ukrainian military while still an undergraduate at the Ivan Franko National University of Lviv.

Planning to finish her PhD this spring, Romanyshyn is currently investigating molecular and cellular mechanisms of antimicrobial resistance with mathematical models and wet-lab experiments. She says her research has offered a welcome distraction from news about the war in Ukraine. This year, in addition to figuring out her next career steps, she says she hopes to increase the number of stipends her organization offers to help protect and rebuild Ukraine.

PT: Tell us a bit about your background and how you ended up at Stony Brook.

ROMANYSHYN: I was born in Lviv and went to the Ivan Franko National University there, where I studied biochemistry. As an undergrad, I did research at the Institute of Cell Biology at the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. A Stony Brook professor, Dmytro Kozakov, who was originally from Lviv, gave a guest lecture at the institute, and I asked about PhD opportunities in the US. He said I should apply. At the time, I didn’t know a lot about how to get into an American program, and he was really helpful.

Back then, I’d heard of my current adviser, Gábor Balázsi. His group’s research on cellular molecular biology and synthetic biology had been a great source of inspiration. In Lviv I had studied Parkinson’s disease on yeast, which are simplified models of the human cell that allow you to look deeper and faster at molecular processes. Balázsi was doing a lot of models of different diseases on yeast cells and other cell types. I applied to the PhD program at Stony Brook. Things have gone wonderfully.

PT: What do you plan to do next?

ROMANYSHYN: That’s a little uncertain. I hope to graduate within the next two months. My main PhD paper recently got accepted, and I got a green light from my dissertation committee. I love doing research, but I also love teaching. I’ll be looking for something that combines teaching and research, like an education or teaching-heavy postdoc.

When I came to the US, I never expected that I would stay, but I met my husband here. He’s a medical student and researcher, and he recently matched for residency in Houston, which is a big synthetic-biology center. I will hopefully be able to find some position there.

PT: You have some connections to the Ukrainian military. How did you form them?

ROMANYSHYN: Most Ukrainians say that the war started in Ukraine with Russia’s occupation of Crimea and Donbas in 2014, when I was a sophomore in college. The annexation kicked off a student revolution called the Revolution of Dignity, or Maidan Revolution. A lot of young people joined the social movements to support democracy, EU integration, and things like that. The student revolution started as a peaceful protest but ended up as almost a massacre in Kyiv. In the first couple of days, nearly 100 people were killed by the special (riot) police force led by then president Yanukovych. After the removal of Yanukovych, the Russian army invaded and occupied the Donbas region in eastern Ukraine. In response, the Ukrainian military sent troops, and thus nationwide mobilization started.

That’s when I got involved in military journalism. When those sorts of social events are happening, a lot of people need to spread information, check the information, and translate it. I translated military documents to share with English-speaking news organizations. I’ve also been translating for Ukrainian military TV and recently started translating for the YouTube channel of a Ukrainian political analyst. I’m typing subtitles in English so that I can share what’s going on with my English-speaking friends.

PT: What inspired you to start a stipend for Ukrainian students?

ROMANYSHYN: I’ve always wanted to maintain close collaboration and connections with my alma mater, to help Ukrainian students, and to contribute to Ukrainian science. The stipend started in 2020 as a one-person project. I started a website and sent the announcement to the dean of my old university’s biology department, and he shared it with biology deans across Ukraine. I realized I could afford to support students who were just like me but didn’t have any funding for their individual projects. I wanted them to know that they can do research and have funding in Ukraine and don’t need to go somewhere else just to do a simple experiment in the lab.

The stipend is $500, which is enough to buy some simple equipment, reagents, or software for an experiment. The applicants gain experience in grant writing and project management because it’s their own project, not their adviser’s. One student per year gets a one-time stipend, and the research focus can be in biology, biomedicine, engineering, physics, chemistry, computational research, or bioinformatics.

In 2020 about 20 people applied from all over Ukraine. After a review process by a group of experts, the first stipend went to a first-year PhD student in Lviv who was studying different bacteria that help crops grow and improve their quality. I thought her project was a good intersection of research and supporting national production.

Last year a college senior won. She was studying invasion, ironically, but ecological invasion. Her project was about invasive species of fish and their parasites. She was claiming that if you look at the parasites of the fish that invade some territory, you can predict the ecological relationships that are going to develop and evolve and whether the fish will be harmful to the environment or not.

PT: How are you funding the stipend?

ROMANYSHYN: The first round I funded it myself out of pocket. In the second round, our team crowdfunded the stipend. Hopefully we’ll be able to expand.

Right now faculty and alumni from the Ivan Franko University biology department and I are thinking about new avenues for the stipend, in light of recent events. Originally the stipend was just about fundamental research. We’re trying to start Chornobryvtsi-Defense and Chornobryvtsi-Renaissance projects. For the defense projects, we’re not trying to fund weapons or anything like that. But Europe is increasingly funding defense, national security, and information security projects in response to Russian aggression in Ukraine. I was also inspired by the grant that my husband got from the US Department of Defense for synthesizing organs for transplantation in patients, including military veterans from hot spots. No one in Ukraine seems to be funding security-oriented research or other research that academia is less involved in.

And renaissance projects will be related to reconstruction. All the schools, institutions, and research facilities that have been affected by the war, including buildings blown up—students of those institutions can apply for those funds. Then they can, for example, rent an office to meet with their classmates or buy some hardware or software to do online classes or lab meetings.

I’m trying to be optimistic and say that on 1 September, we’re going to kick off the third round, and people are going to apply, and everything’s going to be OK. I’m not going to hope that the stipend funding will grow exponentially, but hopefully we’ll at least offer $500 to classical research and maybe $250 each to the new defense and renaissance projects.

PT: Are there actions you recommend individuals or institutions take in response to the war?

ROMANYSHYN: I would definitely cosign what people in the Ukrainian session at the APS March Meeting said about publicity and how research societies worldwide should avoid collaborating with and funding certain organizations, especially if they have a direct financial relationship with the Russian army.

For institutions that have connections with Ukraine, reaching out to their employees or students who are Ukrainian or who have who have family in Ukraine is a big deal. Just say, “How are you doing? Is there anything I can do? Would you like to postpone a deadline? Would you like to talk later today?”

The war is not just a Russia and Ukraine problem. It’s unfortunately a problem for the whole world. We see rising gas prices and how Europe is switching energy sources. We hear Putin’s threats of nuclear attacks and actions compromising the NATO alliance. It’s in the interest of everyone to try to contribute as much as possible to make the war end as soon as possible. Corporations and large institutions can financially help Ukrainian security services and information protection, and those with the appropriate resources can help militarily. And every single person can help Ukrainians fight the information war and spread the word of justice.

PT: How has your life been since the Russian invasion? Have you been able to work?

ROMANYSHYN: It’s been hard emotionally. The first week I was in a state of shock. I asked myself, “What can I help with?” Well, I can help by trying to graduate, trying to get a job, and maybe getting into organizations that can support fundraising opportunities. And I can keep people informed. I’ve been posting on social media about whatever coordination is needed, especially in Lviv. If someone says they are collecting, for example, knives or vests or bikes, I repost everything and direct people to the right address. And I’ve been translating.

Fortunately, I come from the westernmost city in Ukraine. Even though there have been some missile attacks in Lviv, my family is safe. I’m able to stay connected with them and try to check in every day. There are stories from friends and family who moved out of Kyiv, Kharkiv, or a few other cities because they lost their houses or a family member to missile strikes and gunfire. Currently my parents are hosting our family who got evacuated from the Kyiv region. Most of my friends are now helping with war related projects, such as tactical-net weaving, transporting humanitarian aid, sharing urgent information, crowdfunding, and hosting refugees.

It has been very difficult to focus on experiments and research and writing while checking the news every hour—or, more realistically, every five minutes. The APS March Meeting helped because I gave a talk there unrelated to the war in Ukraine, so I had to prepare. My paper got accepted just before the war, so we were going through the editorial process: editing all the data, uploading materials to the repositories, and so on. That work kept me going. I’m helping by being here; I’m helping by doing my job wherever I am.