Oleg Gorkun Ph.D.

Assistant Professor, Department of Pathology and Lab Medicine

Contact Info: Lab: 919-966-2617, Email: ovg@med.unc.edu

I am an assistant professor and have been at UNC for 12 years. I graduated with a B.S. in Biophysics from Kiev State University, Ukraine. I then received my PhD in Biochemistry from the A.V. Pallidin Institute of Biochemistry, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine where I studied the role of the alpha-carboxy domains of fibrin during polymerization under the supervision of Professor Belitser. I continued to study fibrinogen, as well as its interactions with platelets, as a post-doc for Leonid Medved from 1987-1990. With the demise of the Soviet Union and the decline in funding...I decided it was time to make a big move West...to the lab of John Weisel at the University of Pennsylvania. I was a visiting scientist in John's lab for one year, where I continued some of my earlier studies with the alpha-carboxy domains of fibrinogen.

In 1991, I decided to post-doc with Dr. Susan Lord at the University of North Carolina because of the recombinant fibrinogen system she had developed. I viewed the recombinant system more advantageous for structure-function studies than earlier established methods such as chemical modification and analysis of natural variants, due to the homogeneous population of molecules synthesized and the freedom to construct any mutation we choose. There are some limitations to what we can synthesize because some changes in structure will lead to impaired secretion or assembly. From 1994-2001, I was a Research Instructor at UNC in the Department of Pathology, and just last year I was promoted to the title of Assistant Professor. While at UNC, I have focused my attention on lateral aggregation during fibrin polymerization. I view lateral aggregation as a process with participants from multiple regions of fibrin. I am studying how the N-terminus of the beta chain, the alpha C domains and yet unknown regions of fibrinogen regulate the process of lateral aggregation using recombinant variants as my tool.