A Method Built for Crisis
Zapukhliak's methodology was designed for exactly the kind of environment Ukrainian businesses have had to operate in for years: fast-moving, unstable, and full of variables that don't fit neatly into a spreadsheet. It combines analysis of the external business environment with an assessment of a company's internal resources, wrapped in a change-management framework that helps firms react faster to disruption.
What sets the approach apart is its use of fuzzy logic – a mathematical technique for handling factors that are real but hard to measure precisely, such as corporate culture, the level of trust among employees, or the quality of management practices. By translating these soft variables into an integrated readiness score, the model lets a company see, in concrete terms, how prepared it is to weather change – and lets it simulate different future scenarios depending on how unstable its environment becomes, so leadership can choose the most effective strategy.
"Enterprise resilience is the ability to move into new stable states – adapting to a changing environment or preventing its most damaging effects," Zapukhliak has explained. She places particular weight on the human side of that equation: "A company's readiness for change is a harmonized state of its internal systems, one that lets it respond effectively to challenges."
The approach isn't theoretical. It is already applied at Ukrspetstransgaz and within regional structural units of Ukraine's Gas Transmission System Operator, helping management teams strengthen operational resilience and modernize internal processes during one of the most difficult periods in the country's energy history. The work has also traveled beyond Ukraine's borders, featuring in international academic and educational initiatives under the EU's Erasmus+ program – a channel through which Ukrainian management thinking has reached European classrooms and research institutions.
Her research record includes more than a dozen peer-reviewed publications indexed in Scopus and Web of Science, appearing in journals such as Energies, Oeconomia Copernicana, the European Research Studies Journal, and Springer's Lecture Notes in Mechanical Engineering, alongside a 328-page monograph on the development of gas transportation enterprises under instability. Her work spans enterprise sustainability, digital maturity assessment, underground gas storage infrastructure, and – increasingly – the assessment of instability in wartime conditions.
Building an International Practice
In recent years, Zapukhliak's work has moved decisively beyond a single institution or country. Since 2022 she has completed multiple Erasmus+ staff mobility missions at AGH University of Krakow's Faculty of Management, and in 2024 she returned there as a visiting professor, delivering 60 hours of teaching in the Department of Enterprise Management. In 2023 she served as a researcher under the NAWA/EURECA-PRO program at the Silesian University of Technology in Poland, contributing to training on sustainable collaboration in a rapidly changing society, and acted as speaker and moderator for an EU4Business project run with GIZ on sustainable SME development in the Ivano-Frankivsk region.
That international trajectory has now brought her to the United States. Based in Alpharetta, Georgia, Zapukhliak has built an energy economics consulting practice that draws directly on her academic research: market analysis, economic feasibility studies for energy projects, SWOT and PESTEL diagnostics for enterprises operating in volatile regulatory environments, and strategic guidance for stakeholders navigating market entry and the broader energy transition. Her international network now extends to Georgia State University in Atlanta, adding an American institutional connection to a professional map that already includes AGH Kraków and IFNTUOG in Ivano-Frankivsk.
The move reflects more than a change of address. It signals an expansion of scope – from advising individual Ukrainian gas and energy enterprises through a period of extreme instability, to offering that same crisis-tested framework to a broader, international client base. American companies navigating their own version of volatility – shifting energy markets, tightening regulation, supply-chain disruption – are, in effect, being offered a methodology forged under some of the harshest operating conditions any economy has faced in recent memory.
It is, in many ways, a natural next step for a researcher whose entire body of work has been about one question: how do organizations stay stable and keep functioning when the environment around them refuses to be stable at all. The energy companies of Ukraine, forced to keep gas flowing and power running through a full-scale war, gave her a live testing ground unlike almost anywhere else in the world for answering that question. Now, from the United States, she is positioned to bring those hard-won lessons – about resilience, readiness, and the human factors that make or break a company's ability to adapt – to a wider, international audience of businesses and institutions confronting their own uncertainty.
Her story is also a quiet illustration of a broader pattern: Ukrainian expertise, sharpened under wartime pressure, finding new relevance and new audiences abroad. Where much of the global conversation about Ukraine still centers on rebuilding and recovery, Zapukhliak's trajectory points to something else – Ukrainian scholarship actively shaping how other countries think about resilience, long before crisis forces the question on them.
Across a career that has moved from academic research in Ivano-Frankivsk to visiting professorships in Kraków and now to an energy consulting practice in Georgia, one thread stays constant: a conviction that sound economics, done carefully and tested under real pressure, can help organizations not just survive disruption but come out of it stronger.
Arthur Ginsburg
