Note: Nataliya Rokhmanova has transitioned from the institute (alumni).
Nataliya Rokhmanova is a PhD Student in the joint program between Carnegie Mellon University and the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems. She is co-advised by Dr. Katherine J. Kuchenbecker in the MPI Haptic Intelligence Department and Dr. Eni Halilaj in the CMU Mechanical Engineering Department. She is a US National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow.
Nataliya's research combines technical methods from musculoskeletal biomechanics and wearable haptics in order to develop low-cost systems for rehabilitation. Her doctoral work has focused on methods to bring gait retraining, a promising intervention for knee osteoarthritis, out of the research lab and closer to clinical use. She has addressed the challenge of prescribing individualized gait retraining in clinical settings with a synthetic data generation approach. She contextualized the effect of inconsistent kinematic tracking and haptic feedback on motor learning, inpsiring subsequent work on developing an improved system for providing reliable feedback.
Nataliya received her MSc degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Washington in Seattle, where she was advised by Dr. Eric Rombokas. In her thesis, Sensory Feedback in Lower Limb Prostheses, she developed a haptic feedback system for below-knee amputees, and characterized sensory nerve remapping after a targeted muscle reinnervation surgery. Nataliya received her BSc in Biomedical Engineering at Northwestern University.
In her free time, she helps organize CMU's yearly National Biomechanics Day event for introducing high school students to STEM and biomechanics and served as one of MPI's Internal PhD Representatives.