Pavel Tolmachev, Ph.D.

Pavel Tolmachev is a postdoctoral Fellow in Tatiana Engel’s lab. He received a master’s degree in physics at the University of Moscow, followed by a Ph.D.in electrical and electronic engineering at the University of Melbourne in Australia (EEE department). Tolmachev is interested in motor control and the evolutionary perspective on the development of nervous systems. Additionally, he has extensive teaching experience, teaching a variety of subjects such as physics, calculus, probability theory, programming and digital Signal processing.

Principal Investigator: Tatiana Engel

Fellow: Brianna Glenn

Undergraduate Fellow Project:

To gain insights into inner workings of nervous systems and brains, it is crucial to study animals within their natural habitat, facing the tasks they evolve to solve. However, animal studies are challenging, despite the tremendous advances in experimental methods including optogenetics and imaging techniques. Fully understanding and, thus, simulating simple animals like the roundworm C. elegans, which has only 302 neurons, remains unattainable. Furthermore, there is a general lack of methodology, techniques and principles for full-scale reverse-engineering of the nervous systems.
As an alternative, this project proposes evolving an artificial nervous system while adhering to evolutionary plausible constraints. The first concrete goal is to investigate which evolutionary constraints lead to the emergence of a modular-structured nervous system. The long-term goal is to evolve creatures that are simple enough to simulate, but complex enough to sharpen our methods for reverse-engineering the nervous systems.
The project involves creating an artificial environment and designing the rules of evolution. The SURFiN fellows will gain hands-on experience in artificial intelligence and evolutionary algorithms. The project will allow fellows to gain an in-depth understanding of simulation methods, and principles of neural design.
By the end of the project, fellows will have developed an appreciation for the complexity of the nervous system as well as directly witnessed evolution of artificial organisms. This project will provide a solid foundation for those who wish to pursue further research in the field of artificial intelligence and computational neuroscience.