Olena Kim

Olena Kim was born in Ukraine where she obtained a Master’s degree in Biophysics.  In 2015, she moved to Austria to start her Doctoral studies in neuroscience, at the Institute of Science and Technology (IST) Austria. There she joined the lab of Professor Peter Jonas, which investigates the mechanisms of synaptic communication in hippocampal microcircuits. Her PhD project is about understanding the relation between the function and structure of synapses during neural activity. For this, she is using high pressure freezing coupled to optogenetic stimulation of organotypic slice cultures and acute slices, followed by freeze substitution, serial sectioning and transmission electron microscopy.