Mariia
Miroshnik

10th-11th grade

I completed a course “Chemistry of living systems” at Russian Technology University (RTU) MIREA, at the end of which I was among the 10% of students chosen to run an individual project at the laboratory of the university. I extracted flavonoids, confirmed their presence using qualitative reactions, checked the antibacterial properties of the extracts and monitored the microbial purity of the preparations.

This project, “Development of Extracts from Medicinal Plant Raw Material Salvia officinalis and Evaluation of Their Antioxidant, Antibacterial, and Microbiological Properties”, was awarded at the RTU MIREA’s applied competition “Golden Dozen” 2024 and later at several other All-Russian scientific conferences. At this moment the manuscript of this research is under consideration for publication in the National High School Journal of Science.

1st year at MSU (March-now)

I got an internship at the Laboratory of Cell Biology, IBS RAS under the supervision of Dr. Vorotelyak, Dr. Gaydamaka, and the scientific worker Yana Tatarenko. I extract, culture and passage MenSC, sometimes conducting karyotyping and mastering microscopy methods, confocal and fluorescent, as well as staining techniques, immunocytochemistry and fluorescent labeling. I follow the process of the main experiments on MenSC standardization and discuss the results with the team.

June-now 2026

My fellow students (Kirill Azmukov, Anna Zagorovskaya, David Khlebnikov) and I conducted a comparative study of AI plant identification apps on four species and built a Python-based hint system using Mayevsky’s botanical guide to recommend which plant’s specific parts to photograph for accurate identification. I then extended this work by training an InceptionV3 classifier and applying Grad-CAM to it to see what exactly the model is looking at, but used the data set with non-removed background, resulting in biased learning.

Now, our team is comparing and analyzing the architectures of different neural networks to find the best fit for plant identification. In addition, our thesis of this research has been accepted at the All-Russian Youth Scientific Conference with International Participation “Biotechnology in Crop Production, Animal Husbandry and Agricultural Microbiology” that will be held on October 27.

July 2026

As a part of scientific work at the MSU’s summer practice I was among the selected students (~15% of all) who investigated associative learning and long-term memory formation in the miniature wasp Trichogramma cacoeciae. Our group used protein synthesis inhibitors (anisomycin, actinomycin D, fasudil) to distinguish between memory types. There I performed behavioral experiments and ran data analysis (DeepLabCut, MATLAB, ImageJ).

We concluded that protein synthesis inhibition is expected to abolish intermediate- and long-term memory in Trichogramma cacoeciae while sparing short-term memory, indicating that extreme brain miniaturization restricts memory consolidation to translation-independent mechanisms.

August 2026

At the Zvenigorod Biological Station, I was engaged in research on the enzymatic composition of crop extracts from two gastropods, Helix pomatia and Arion vulgaris. I learned sample preparation, ran ion-exchange chromatography, electrophoresis and spectrophotometry, and performed the calculations needed to set up these experiments. Through the work I gained hands-on skills in protein separation and detection, and saw how organism biology connects to enzyme chemistry.