Polina V. Lishko

Polina V. Lishko, Ph.D. is a BJC Investigator and Professor of Cell Biology and Physiology

at the Department of Cell Biology and Physiology, Washington University in St. Louis, School of Medicine. She was recently an Associate Professor in the Molecular and Cell Biology Department at the University of California, Berkeley, and also currently holds an Adjunct Associate Professor appointment at the Center for Reproductive Longevity and Equality (CRLE) at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging. She received her Ph.D. in Biophysics from the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine in 2000, where she studied the molecular mechanisms of neurodegeneration and memory. Dr. Lishko did her postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard Medical School, and later at Harvard University working on molecular mechanisms of light perception in the eye, and later she studied the structure-function relation of the heat-activating TRPV ion channels- the receptors for pain and temperature. From 2006 to 2011, Dr. Lishko was an instructor at the University of California, San Francisco, where she studied the function of ion channels in reproduction and the role of mitochondrial ion transporters in thermogenesis. In 2012, she became a faculty at the University of California, Berkeley, where her team studied the physiology of steroid signaling and how membrane steroid receptors regulate mammalian reproductive and neuronal functions.

Dr. Lishko's research is currently funded by NIH and various private foundations. In addition to being a Pew Biomedical Scholar and a Sloan Fellow, Dr. Lishko has received Margaret Oakley Dayhoff Award in Biophysics and is a MacArthur fellow. She has served as a research mentor for numerous postdoctoral fellows, graduate, and undergraduate students. She was a lecturer in the Frontiers in Reproduction course taught at Marine Biology Lab, Woods Hole, served on NIH study sections, and serves as an Editorial Advisory Board member for PLOS Biology, the Journal of General Physiology, and Bioelectricity.