Dr. Rybak began his career in 1977 at AB Kogan Research Institute of Neurocybernetics at Rostov State University, Russia. In 1991, he moved to the U.S., and from 1993 to 1999 he worked for DuPont Company in Wilmington, Delaware. In 1993 and 1994, he served as a visiting professor at Le Havre University in France. In 1999, Dr. Rybak came to Drexel's School of Biomedical Engineering, Science and Health Systems, serving as a research professor. He joined the College of Medicine in 2006.
He is now a professor in the Department of Neurobiology and Anatomy at Drexel University College of Medicine.
Research Overview
Research Interests
Dr. Rybak's research interests include:
- Modeling biological neurons
- Modeling biological neural networks and neural systems at different spatial and time scales
- Neural oscillations
- Neural control of locomotion and breathing
- Visual perception and motor control
Visit the Laboratory for Theoretical and Computational Neuroscience.
Research
The long-term goal of Dr. Rybak's work is to understand the key issue of neural control of movement: how different cellular, network and systems' neural mechanisms are integrated across multiple levels of organization to produce motor behavior and to adapt this behavior to various external and internal conditions. Investigations of the brainstem neural mechanisms responsible for neural control of breathing, and neural circuits in the spinal cord involved in control of locomotion, provide a unique and attractive opportunity to develop and investigate comprehensive computational models that can bring into a uniform framework the existing experimental data and current hypotheses related to different levels of systems organization and behavior.