Olesia Shlakhter is a PhD student in the Department of Plant and Environmental Sciences at the Weizmann Institute of Science, studying marine bacterial physiology under the supervision of Dr. Einat Segev. She has a BSc in Biotechnology and Bioengineering from Karazin Kharkiv National University in Ukraine and MSc in Life Sciences from the Weizmann Institute.
In her PhD research, Olesia investigates the physiological adaptations that enable marine bacteria to survive periods of nutrient limitation. Her work focuses on comparative proteomic analysis of bacterial cells in actively growing versus starvation conditions. Currently, she is conducting functional studies of proteins that are overrepresented during starvation, with the goal of identifying molecular markers of starvation in marine bacteria.