Zenyuk was born in
Ukraine and emigrated to the US at age 15. She received a B.S in Mechanical Engineering from Polytechnic University (now
NYU Tandon School of Engineering) in 2008, graduating
summa cum laude. She currently serves on their Alumni Board., where she worked on the fundamental understanding meso-scale interfacial transport phenomena and electric double layers in fuel cells. She then became a postdoctoral fellow at
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory from 2014 to 2015 studying water-management in Polymer Electrolyte Fuel Cell using
x-ray at the
Advanced Light Source. From 2015 to 2018, she was an assistant professor at
Tufts University, before joining
University of California, Irvine in 2018 as an assistant professor in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering Department. She is also the director of the National Fuel Cell Research Center at UCI. Zenyuk is an accomplished
chess player, reaching a peak
FIDE rating of 2312 and peak
US Chess Federation rating of 2380, in addition to achieving the
Woman International Master title. She also competed in a US - China chess match in August 2013, hosted in Ningbo, China. Zenyuk used to write weekly columns for chess.com from 2009 to 2013, where she would give advice for amateur chess players. At the start of the
Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, she organized a fundraising to help Ukrainian scientists called the UCI's Ukraine Emergency Response Fund, and collected over $200,000. == Awards and honors ==