Brokoslaw Laschowski

Dr. Brokoslaw Laschowski is a computational neuroscientist. He works as a Research Scientist and Principal Investigator at the Toronto Rehabilitation Institute, Canada’s largest rehabilitation hospital, and as an Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto with appointments in Neuroscience and Mechanical Engineering. He also serves as Director of the Computational Neuroscience Lab, a multidisciplinary research laboratory that explores the intersection of neuroscience, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence. His research focuses on the development of new mathematical, computational, and machine learning models to reverse-engineer and/or interface with the brain. In addition to advancing the scientific understanding of intelligence in biological and artificial systems, one of the clinical applications of his models is to control robotic and neuroprosthetic technologies to assist patients with motor impairments, ranging from autonomous control using brain-inspired algorithms to neural control using brain-machine interfaces. The long-term vision for his research is to reverse-engineer the human brain and discover fundamental principles of learning and intelligence.

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 deep learning for visual perception, 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 developed mathematical models to reverse-engineer how neural computations in the brain control and optimize human movement based on optimal control theory. 

Dr. Laschowski has published in many leading scientific journals, such as the Frontiers in Neurorobotics and the IEEE Transactions on Medical Robotics and Bionics. He previously worked at the Holland Bloorview Kids Rehabilitation Hospital and served as Co-Founder and Director of 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 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 in media outlets 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. Overall, he is a computational cognitive neuroscientist with expertise in studying the human brain using artificial intelligence and using the brain as inspiration to develop next-generation AI algorithms.