Brokoslaw Laschowski

Dr. Brokoslaw Laschowski is a neuroscientist with expertise in robotics and artificial intelligence. He works as a Research Scientist and Principal Investigator at the Toronto Rehabilitation Institute, Canada’s largest rehabilitation hospital, and an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering at the University of Toronto. He also works as a Core Faculty Member in the University of Toronto Robotics Institute, where he directs the Neural Robotics Lab – a multidisciplinary research lab that focuses on developing artificial brains and interfacing with the human brain. One of the main applications of his research is robot control to assist patients with physical disabilities, ranging from autonomous control using reinforcement learning and computer vision (i.e., powered by artificial neural networks) to neural control using myoelectric or brain-machine interfaces (i.e., driven by biological neural networks). Overall, he specializes in developing new mathematical and computational models to model and/or interface with the brain, with applications in learning, optimization, and control of robotic systems that interact with humans.

Dr. Laschowski completed his postdoctoral fellowship in the Temerty Faculty of Medicine at the University of Toronto. Prior to that, he received his PhD 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 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 brain controls and optimizes 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.