I grew up in Kharkiv, the city in eastern Ukraine that is now being constantly bombarded by the Russian military. I went to a secondary school on the outskirts of Kharkiv. Upon graduation, I was the only one of my classmates to be admitted to Kharkiv National University, the premier institution of Ukraine where the atom was split for the first time in Soviet Union. I graduated from KNU with a BSc in Biophysics.

I succeeded in getting accepted into the PhD program at the University of Alberta in Canada. It was the biggest break of my life! My mentor, Dr. Prochazka, is an engineer turned neuroscientist and he became my inspiration. Under his leadership I studied neuroplasticity, from the plasticity in the reflex contribution to locomotion after peripheral nerve damage to the effects of neuromuscular stimulation on hemiparesis after stroke.

I continued my research career as a postdoc at the University of Montreal in Canada under the mentorship of Dr. Kalaska. I looked for answers to one of the most fundamental questions in motor control - how the information from body sensors is integrated with the musculoskeletal dynamics during movement? I was the primary author on experimental and computation research that addressed several specific questions on sensorimotor integration during goal-directed arm movements in humans. We have shown that proprioception is combined with internal predictive signals to optimally sense limb state. We have also shown that this optimal state estimation signal is used as part of rapid error feedback to respond to external and internal perturbations of ongoing movement. We found that this “online correction” relies on proportional dynamic error feedback to adjust movement and that it has limited plasticity in presence of visuomotor transformations. From Dr. Kalaska I learned how to develop my scientific ideas and to gain insight into the owrkings of our nervous system.