Brokoslaw Laschowski

Dr. Brokoslaw Laschowski is a Research Scientist and Principal Investigator at the Toronto Rehabilitation Institute, Canada’s largest rehabilitation hospital, and a Faculty Member at the University of Toronto with appointments in the Neuroscience Program and the Robotics Institute, where he directs the Neural Robotics Lab—a multidisciplinary research lab that combines neuroscience, robotics, and artificial intelligence. His research focuses on the development of new mathematical, computational, and machine learning models to model and/or interface with the brain. In addition to advancing the scientific understanding of intelligence in biological and artificial systems, one of the practical applications of his models is to control robotic and neuroprosthetic technologies to assist patients with physical disabilities, ranging from autonomous control using brain-inspired algorithms to neural control using brain-machine interfaces. The long-term vision for his research is to study, along this spectrum of autonomy, what level of control do individual patients prefer, which remains one of the major unsolved research questions in the field.

Dr. Laschowski completed his postdoctoral fellowship in the Temerty Faculty of Medicine at the University of Toronto. Prior to that, he received his PhD degree from the Department of Systems Design Engineering, with a specialization in biomedical engineering, at the University of Waterloo and the Waterloo Artificial Intelligence Institute. His PhD research focused on visual perception and environment-adaptive control of robotic systems using deep learning, modelling the visual information processing neural networks in the brain. He received his master’s degree from the Department of Mechanical and Mechatronics Engineering also at the University of Waterloo, where he studied computational neuroscience and developed mathematical models to reverse engineer how the neural computations in the brain control and optimize human movement based on optimal control theory.

Dr. Laschowski has published in many leading scientific journals, including the Frontiers in Neurorobotics, the IEEE Transactions on Medical Robotics and Bionics, and the Frontiers in Robotics and AI. He previously worked at the Holland Bloorview Kids Rehabilitation Hospital and co-founded and directed the summer research program in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto for student refugees from Ukraine, with funding from the Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence. He has given invited talks at top international conferences such as the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) and has been awarded competitive and external funding (e.g., from the Canada Foundation for Innovation and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada). His award-winning research has been featured on media networks like BBC, CBC, Forbes, and Maclean’s magazine, in addition to a keynote talk by the President and CEO of NVIDIA and showcased to the South Korean President.