Oleksandr PETRENKO graduated from Kharkiv State University in 1976, in 1984 he defended his candidate's thesis, and in 1993 he defended his doctoral thesis in the specialties "cryobiology" and "biochemistry". Since 1998, he has been a professor specializing in "cell biology". Since 1999, he has been the head of the cryobiochemistry department, and since 2021, he has been the director of the Institute of Cryobiology and Cryomedicine of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine.
O. Yu. Petrenko is a well-known specialist in the fields of cryobiology, biochemistry, cell biology, stem cell biology, tissue engineering, experimental cell transplantation and hypothermic storage of organs.
The results of Oleksandr Petrenko's scientific research are presented in more than 500 scientific publications, including 14 patents and 2 monographs. He is the author and co-author of 38 articles published in journals of the I and II quartiles of the corresponding sections of the Web of Science. According to Google Scholar, Oleksandr Petrenko's h-index is 20, from Scopus - 16.
He is also a professor at the UNESCO Department and the Department of Biochemistry of V.N. Karazin Kharkiv National University, where he teaches the author's course "Stem Cell Biology". Prepared 1 doctor and 20 candidates of sciences.
For scientific works in the field of cryobiology and biochemistry O.Yu. Petrenko was awarded the State Prize of Ukraine in the field of science and technology, the prize of the Presidium of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine named after O.V. Palladin, the Memorial Award of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, the scholarship of the Kharkiv Regional State Administration in the field of medicine named after I.I. Mechnikov. Oleksandr Petrenko worked as a visiting professor at the Universities of Great Britain, Israel, France and Canada. He acted as a scientific leader of the Wellcome Trust and STCU grant projects, as well as joint Ukrainian-Israeli scientific projects. Today, he is the head of the joint Ukrainian-Czech project and the responsible executor from the Ukrainian side of the "Visegrad+" project.
Oleksandr Petrenko is a member of editorial boards of foreign and domestic scientific journals.