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. I became fascinated by radiation therapy as I learned that it used radiation to save people’s lives by destroying their cancer cells. I also became interested in programming as a tool to efficiently analyze data and conduct various research without involving physical human bodies and radiation.

In Fall 2018, I was accepted to the “Modeling and Simulation” PhD program at University of Central Florida and received the ORC Doctoral Fellowship for 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 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 student personal and professional growth, the quality of technologies and the beauty of school 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 them) which equipped me with a better understanding of today's technological advances and tools that I could use in my research. Thus, I learned programming, data mining, statistical analysis, data visualization, and data storytelling.

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, and “Advanced Algorithmics and Graph Theory with Python” from Institute Mines-Télécom.

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