His PhD is from the Toxicology Program at the University of Georgia in Athens where he started working on the consequences of environmental radioactivity on genetic diversity in the wild after the Chernobyl disaster in Ukraine. He continued working on genetic diversity in human populations as it relates to disease at the National Cancer Institute. Dr. Oleksyk continues to work on projects in genetic diversity in diverse admixed populations from the Caribbean islands to Russia, and actively participates in the 1000 Genomes Project. Together with Dr. Martinez-Cruzado he has built one of the largest undergraduate research programs in the Caribbean focusing on next generation sequencing genomics and bioinformatics.