Dr. Kukekova graduated from St. Petersburg State University in Russia and obtained her PhD at the Institute of Cytology of the Russian Academy of Sciences. She then proceeded to a post-doctoral program at the Baker Institute for Animal Health at Cornell University where she was a research associate and subsequently a principal research scientist in the laboratory of Dr. Greg Acland. In 2002, she established a collaboration with Dr. Trut’s group at the Institute of Cytology and Genetics of the Russian Academy of Sciences to study the genetics of complex behaviors in the fox model of animal domestication. Since 2012, Dr. Kukekova is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Animal Sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.