Professor Vyacheslav (Slava) Yurchenko

Position

Ordinary Council member (2023-)

Professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology at the University of Ostrava, Czech Republic

Vyacheslav (Slava) Yurchenko is a Professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology  at the University of Ostrava, Czech Republic. Slava did his PhD at the Moscow State University in Russia under prof. Alexander Kolesnikov working on kinetoplast genome of various trypanosomatids with a particular focus on minicircles and RNA editing. After graduation, he moved to the States (well, to NY, to be precise) and spent several years doing hard-core molecular virology and then immunology at the Einstein College of Medicine and Rockefeller University. He fairly quickly realized that immunology is not a “love of his life” and moved back to Europe to establish his own laboratory of Trypanosomatid Biology in Ostrava raising in rank to the Full Professor.  

Slava runs a very international lab that is working on all the imaginable aspects of trypanosomatid biology, except, of course, for immunology. These include, but not limited to, taxonomy and systematics, analysis of virulence factors in Leishmania, omics sensu lato, mechanisms of translation, RNA editing, telomeres, and analysis of endobionts in these fascinating parasites https://web.osu.cz/~Yurchenko/