Jennifer Mazzarella-Konstantynova is a PhD candidate in Cultural Analysis at the University of Zurich's Institute of Slavic and Eastern European Studies (ISOS), supervised by Prof. Dr Sylvia Sasse (University of Zurich) and Prof. Dr Thomas Deißinger (University of Constance). Her research draws on educational science, the history of vocational education and training (VET) and higher education, migration studies, Eastern European studies, and cultural analysis.

She has worked as a research associate and a teaching and research assistant at the UZH Institute of Education, where she has explored the historical institutionalisation and educationalisation of vocational, academic and career guidance in Switzerland; the transformation of former Höhere Wirtschafts- und Verwaltungsschulen (HWVs) into Universities of Applied Sciences in Switzerland; and higher education research. Jennifer has taught at bachelor's and master's levels, as well as in professional additional qualifications for vocational baccalaureate teachers. She also has over 14 years of experience in primary education, including in school leadership. She currently represents academic mid-level staff on university and faculty committees at UZH.

Her doctoral project grew from a long-standing interest in history, nation-building, educational systems, governance, politics, and transitions, and a question rooted in experience long before it became an academic one: what shapes how people adapt when cultural systems collide? Having grown up near Point Alpha — one of the most strategically important sites of the Cold War — and being closely connected to Ukraine through family, she witnessed firsthand both the consequences of the geopolitical divide and the ways people learned to navigate entirely new cultural and political logics in its wake. These experiences of discontinuity and reconfiguration now find their theoretical home in her research.