Olena Korotych is a teaching assistant professor in the Department of Biochemistry & Cellular and Molecular Biology. She earned her PhD in colloid chemistry at the Ovcharenko Institute of Biocolloid Chemistry in Kyiv, Ukraine, and was a postdoctoral researcher in biomedical engineering at the University of Florida. She has taught at UT since 2020.

Korotych’s teaching centers on BCMB 419, the department’s capstone biochemistry lab, which she redesigned in 2021 around quantitative experiments and data analysis. Students purify recombinant proteins, measure enzyme kinetics, and analyze data with research software. As a 2026 UT GenAI Faculty Fellow, she built assignments in which students use AI to plan experiments and interpret results, then check its suggestions against their own data and the literature.

Her research is in membrane biochemistry and biomaterials. With Barry Bruce’s lab, she developed methods to extract membrane protein complexes from chloroplasts and mitochondria with styrene-maleic acid copolymers and to separate them by electrophoresis. At Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Korotych used neutron reflectometry to study how these polymers interact with lipid membranes. With colleagues in Ukraine, she develops hydrogels and nanocomposites for medicine and agriculture, including porous implants with gold nanoparticles for plastic surgery.

Korotych’s undergraduate research students have studied nuclear receptors with Elias Fernandez’s lab and enzymes linked to bacterial antibiotic resistance with Wright. Four have presented at EURēCA, and two won second place at ASUReS 2026.