Irina A. Okkelman

Irina A. Okkelman is a post-doctoral researcher in the Laboratory of Tissue Engineering and Biomaterials, in the Department of Human Structure and Repair, Ghent University (Belgium). She received her undergraduate with honors degree from Kazan State University of the Republic of Tatarstan (2007), and a Ph.D. from the Shemyakin-Ovchinnikov Institute of Bioorganic Chemistry, Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow (2014).

During her postdoctoral training in the Laboratory of Biophysics and Bioanalysis at the School of Biochemistry and Cell Biology, University College Cork, Ireland (2014 – 2020), she gained an experience in analysis of cell metabolism and oxygenation of 3D cell and tissue cultures (spheroids, organoids, ex vivo tissues), using F(P)LIM live microscopy approaches. She developed some innovative FLIM-based methods for quantitative analysis of oxygenation (2017), mitochondrial polarization (2020), cell proliferation and duration of S phase (2016) in the intestinal organoids. Since 2020, she continues her research in imaging assisted tissue engineering at the laboratory of Prof. Dmitriev, Ghent University.