Dr. Olga Bondareva

Olga Bondareva completed her Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Applied Mathematics and Physics at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (Russia). In 2014, she moved to Germany to pursue a PhD in Biology within the CiM-IMPRS Joint Graduate Program of the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Biomedicine and the University of Münster. During her doctoral training, she developed expertise in vascular biology, epigenetics, and bioinformatics. 

In 2018, she joined the laboratory of Lutz Hein at the University of Freiburg as a postdoctoral researcher, where she further advanced her work on cardiovascular disease and epigenetic regulation. There, she established a novel single-cell RNA-sequencing pipeline for the analysis of human cardiomyocytes. 

In 2020, Olga was recruited to the Helmholtz Institute for Metabolism, Obesity and Vascular Research (HI-MAG) in Leipzig. She has since played a key role in establishing single-cell technologies at the institute and is currently focused on understanding how metabolic disease drives vascular damage. 

Olga Bondareva’s research focuses on vascular dysfunction in diseases driven by metabolic stress and obesity. She is particularly interested in the molecular mechanisms of transcriptional regulation and epigenetic control in vascular cells, and in how these processes shape cellular responses to environmental cues and disease states. Her work integrates cutting-edge approaches to study transcriptional and epigenetic regulation, including single-cell multiomics and spatial transcriptomics. 

Her research spans experimental, computational, and translational approaches. She employs the Ossabaw pig, a clinically relevant large animal model, to investigate both healing and maladaptive responses following endovascular interventions. Her goal is to advance mechanistic insight and strengthen the translational relevance of this work to human vascular disease. This work is supported by a personal DFG grant. In parallel, she analyzes human clinical samples to identify novel biomarkers of premature peripheral artery disease and to elucidate sex-specific differences in vascular pathology.