About

Now

I am a Ramon y Cajal fellow at the Barcelona Artificial Intelligence in Medicine Lab in the University of Barcelona. Currently working on the topics of understanding foundation models and resource efficient vision-language models in Medical Imaging.

Education

I hold a PhD degree in Artificial Intelligence and Medical Image Analysis, Master's degree in Computer Vision and Robotics, and Bachelor's degree in Information Systems.

Brief

I was born in a little village in the middle of nowhere, called Abay in the South of Kazakhstan. Growing up in a post-soviet, very Kazakh family of teachers, I spoke three languages: Kazakh, Russian, and Uzbek. The last one just happened because we had TV channels randomly picked up from our southern neighbor.

Many exciting and boring things happened until I reached where I am now. Lived in France and UK for some time and I am now living in Spain. Fluent in English and learning Spanish.

Interests & Hobbies

I am interested in computer vision, medical imaging, deep learning, and artificial intelligence. These interests lead me to follow a career in academia and research.

Music, drawing, reading, and sim-racing are my hobbies. I play the dombyra, a traditional Kazakh folk instrument, and a little bit of guitar. Being colorblind and having a hard time with colors makes me draw only using pencil. I like reading classics when it comes to literature, but recently got into science-fiction and fantasy. I am still waiting for fully autonomous cars to hit the streets, until then I will keep driving in a simulator.