Olena Strelnyk completed her habilitation in Sociology in 2018 at Taras Shevchenko Kyiv National University, Ukraine. She is the author of Childcare as Work. A Sociological Perspective on Mothering (Kyiv 2017) and about 100 scientific and popular science publications on the topics of gender inequality in Ukraine, care work, and the impact of war on gender roles. She was a visiting scholar at the Institute for Research on Women and Gender, University of Michigan (2016), at the Prague Civil Society Centre (2019), and the Technical University of Munich (2022–2024). Olena also writes for Ukrainian and international media resources on gender-related topics. She currently works as a senior researcher at the Institute of Sociology of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine and is an associate researcher at Indiana University Bloomington.

Since October 2024, she has been a fellow in the Ukraine Research Network@ZOiS. Her project is titled Seeing the Invisible: Family Care for the Elderly in a War-Torn Ukraine. It focuses on how families organise everyday care for the elderly, including in the context of the war, and how structural conditions (at both micro and macro levels) influence the practices of organising this care. These practices are considered to be gendered as they are shaped by a patriarchal gender order, where women are assigned the function of caring for children and the elderly.