Olga Kovalchuk was a 16-year-old high-school student in Ukraine in 1986 when the Chernobyl nuclear power had a meltdown, and the explosion released a toxic cloud of radioactive particles over a large swath of the country.
That event, one of the world’s worst nuclear disasters, had a profound influence on Dr. Kovalchuk’s future career.
The University of Lethbridge professor, who grew up about 600 kilometres from the site of the accident, recalls her father coming to find her at school one rainy day shortly after the blast to warn her to stay indoors. “My Dad tried to find me and tell me, ‘You shouldn’t be here, you shouldn’t be in this rain,’ ” she says.
Dr. Kovalchuk was the eldest of two daughters of parents who were university professors; her father was a biochemist and her mother a linguist. She completed her MD at the Ivano-Frankivsk National Medical University in Ukraine, and her PhD at Ukrainian National Scientific Centre of Medical Genetics and Hygiene. While doing research at university, she met geneticists who were studying the health effects of radiation exposure caused by the blast. She had found her niche.
She met and married her husband, Igor, who is currently also a scientist at the University of Lethbridge, and the two emigrated to Switzerland in 1996 to work at the Friedrich Miescher Institute for Biomedical Research in Basel. In 2001 they moved to Lethbridge, Alta., to take up their current posts. The university had two research positions available and they “were a perfect fit,” Dr. Kovalchuk says. “It was serendipity.”
Nowadays, the focus of Dr. Kovalchuk’s research is on epigenetics, the study of how genes are affected by environmental, lifestyle and other factors, and the role that epigenetics plays in cancer development. “If we can compare it to a computer, in genetics, the genes are the hardware,” she explains, and epigenetics is the software that tells the genes what to do and how to behave.
“It definitely plays a huge role in cancer predisposition and the development of cancer,” she adds. Dr. Kovalchuk’s specific area of research involves looking at what influence stress factors, such as radiation, have on epigenetics.
She hopes her research will one day be able to help the victims of the Chernobyl disaster, and others, by coming up with a way to identify individuals who may be predisposed to developing cancer. “If we can do that, then we can determine what changes they need to make or find medical interventions,” before the disease occurs, she explains.
Dr. Kovalchuk, who holds a Canadian Institutes of Health Research Chair in Gender, Sex and Health, also researches how male and female responses to radiation exposure differ. “In the long run, the goal would be to influence radiation safety guidelines for men and women,” she says.
She and her husband, whose research focuses on plant epigenetics, have been instrumental in bringing the study of epigenetics to the forefront at the University of Lethbridge.
Dr. Kovalchuk gives community lectures on breast cancer and meets regularly with survivor groups to keep them up-to-date on the newest research developments. She and her husband have an 18-year-old daughter.
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