Polina Valeriivna Lishko (born 1974) is an American cellular and developmental biologist. She was a 2015 Pew biomedical scholar. She is a 2020 MacArthur Fellow. She is currently an associate professor at the University of California, Berkeley as well as an adjunct professor at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging.

Early life and education

Polina V. Lishko was born in

Kiev Kyiv, also spelled Kiev, is the capital and most populous city of Ukraine. It is in north-central Ukraine along the Dnieper, Dnieper River. As of 1 January 2021, its population was 2,962,180, making Kyiv the List of European cities by populat ...

, Ukrainian SSR, Soviet Union (now Kyiv, Ukraine) in 1974. Her parents were chemists who worked at Taras Shevchenko National University. In 1996, Lishko graduated with a Specialist degree from Taras Shevchenko National University. She completed her Ph.D. in 2000 under the supervision of Oleg Alexandrovich Krishtal at the

Bogomoletz Institute of Physiology Bogomoletz Institute of Physiology of NAS of Ukraine (BIPH) is a scientific institution dedicated to biomedical research in the fields of physiology, biophysics, pathophysiology, neuroscience. It is a leading research center in Ukraine for neurosci ...

in Ukraine. At the Bogomoletz Institute of Physiology, she met Yuriy Kirichok, whom she would later marry.

Career

After obtaining her Ph.D., Lishko was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University in the Rachelle Gaudet lab. From 2006 to 2011, she worked at the University of California, San Francisco. Since 2012, she has taught at the University of California, Berkeley and holds the position of associate professor. She was the first person to successfully perform electrophysiology on human sperm. Her lab currently focuses on sperm ion channels, sperm mitochondrial uncoupling, steroid hormones and ovarian aging, and bioactive lipid signalling in the choroid plexus. In 2016, her lab discovered the mechanism for how

progesterone Progesterone (P4) is an endogenous steroid and progestogen sex hormone involved in the menstrual cycle, pregnancy, and embryogenesis of humans and other species. It belongs to a group of steroid hormones called the progestogens and is the m ...

activates spermatozoa through the protein ABHD2. In 2022 she was awarded the Senior Cranefield Award by The Journal of General Physiology and The Society of General Physiologists for her work on sex steroids on potassium channels. In 2022, Lishko was named by

Carnegie Corporation of New York The Carnegie Corporation of New York is a philanthropic fund established by Andrew Carnegie in 1911 to support education programs across the United States, and later the world. Carnegie Corporation has endowed or otherwise helped to establis ...

as an honoree of the Great Immigrants Awards.

Notes

References

External links

* https://lishkolab.org/
Polina Lishko, Cellular and Developmental Biologist , 2020 MacArthur Fellow
1974 births Living people 21st-century American women scientists American biophysicists MacArthur Fellows Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv alumni Ukrainian emigrants to the United States University of California, Berkeley College of Letters and Science faculty University of California, San Francisco faculty Women biophysicists {{US-biologist-stub