Part IV. Orlando
While I enjoyed the study of nuclear reactors and their safety systems, the work in a purely practical engineering sphere did not appeal to me sufficiently. Going back to my childhood experience with the Chernobyl soldier, I grew to realize that modeling and visualization of the effects of radiation on humans would be the right path for me. In addition to the settings of nuclear disasters and normal nuclear power station operation, I became interested in studying the effects of radiation on humans during radiotherapy, medical imaging, and space exploration as well.
Thus, in 2017, I started to look for a Ph.D. program that would help me acquire skills necessary for my research interest. My attention was caught by the “Modeling and Simulation” program at University of Central Florida, Institute for Simulation & Training. The program's areas of specialization included simulation in healthcare, modeling, analysis, and data visualization. I decided to apply. The program accepted me for Fall 2018 and I was funded with the UCF ORC Doctoral Fellowship during my first year.
The experience of living alone in a foreign country and studying in a foreign language has been new and challenging for me, especially during the first two years. However, I found American education to be interesting and very different from Russian. I was surprised by how much freedom students had in selecting projects for their classes as well as in selecting classes themselves. I was fascinated by the number of resources for students' personal and professional growth, the quality of technologies and the beauty of the university facilities.
At UCF, I took classes at the Department of Modeling and Simulation, Statistics and Computer Science. I enjoyed the labs and individual class projects (see Individual Class Projects section for details on some of my works) which equipped me with a better understanding of today's technological advances and tools that I could use in my own research. Thus, I learned about the power of programming and started to write codes in Python, R and SAS as well as to create simulations in AnyLogic. I developed data preparation, data mining and statistical analysis skills; studied the concepts of data storytelling and learned to create effective data visualizations.
From Fall 2019 to Summer 2022, I did an internship at Orlando Health Cancer Institute where I worked on modeling and visualization of the effects of radiation therapy on brain tumors (see Research section for details).
Along my Ph.D. journey at UCF, I earned a master’s degree in Modeling and Simulation in Summer 2020 and SAS Data Mining graduate certificate in Spring 2021. In November 2020, I was awarded the Vince and Beth Amico Scholarship by the National Center for Simulation. From Fall 2019 to Summer 2022, I was a recipient of .decimal Corporation Graduate Student Research Funding.
In addition to UCF classes, I took some courses on Coursera and edX from other schools to master programming skills and/or to enhance my theoretical knowledge. Thus, I took “Machine Learning” and “Statistical Learning” from Stanford University, “Introduction to the Biology of Cancer” from Johns Hopkins University, “Advanced Algorithmics and Graph Theory with Python” from Institute Mines-Télécom as well as many CITI Training courses on responsible conduct of research.
