RSI Alumni Feature: Kyla Alsbury, PhD ‘24

RSI PhD student Josh Shore sat down with alumnus Kyla Alsbury, a physiotherapist and graduate of the RSI PhD program in 2024, to talk about her career path since graduating and how her time at RSI helped shape her professional development.  

Kyla discusses how graduate training at RSI helped her develop professional independence, strong leadership skills, and an ability to manage multiple responsibilities simultaneously. She also highlights how the broad scientific knowledge she gained through RSI prepared her to engage effectively with researchers in her role as COO of a behavioral research software start-up.  

Tell us about your current position – Where do you work? What is your role? 

I am the Chief Operating Officer (COO) of a Montreal-based technology start-up company called SilicoLabs, which I co-founded alongside my partner Benjamin towards the end of my PhD. Essentially, we build tools that help researchers capture and decode behavior to reveal the foundations of learning, decision making, and actions. We're trying to allow researchers to capture data that unlocks new insights about how people interact with each other and the world. 

We designed a user-friendly platform called LABO that allows anyone to quickly and easily create complex interactive experiments or experiences that simulate the real world, without computer programming expertise. Using our platform, you can capture high-fidelity behavioral data like hand, face, and eye tracking when using extended reality devices. You can also integrate data from biosensors like electroencephalography (EEG) and Functional Near Infrared Spectroscopy (fNIRS).  

What are your responsibilities as COO?  

It’s pretty broad. As the operations officer, I basically keep the business side of things running for our company, maintaining our processes and iterating them as needed to make sure we're as efficient as possible. I also do the not so sexy things like bookkeeping, talking to our accountants and lawyers, running social media communications, and making sure we've got all of our company documents organized. I don't do any of the coding for our software.  

I have a lot of contact with researchers, which is really the goal of our company – we want to help researchers do really exciting work. So, I offer support and answer questions to current users of our platform, as well as people who are not users yet but may be interested. For example, this morning, I was sending off a quote to a potential user as well as sending out a recording from an onboarding session. I also go to a lots of conferences and lead workshops to demonstrate our platform.  

How did you find and/or make it to your current position? 

I like to say I hired myself, which is kind of a funny way to say it. My origins with Silico Labs really date back to the first year of my PhD when I took a knowledge translation course and learned that it can take 17 years to translate health research into practice. That really shocked me because the whole reason I went into my PhD was to generate new knowledge that can help our field. This realization motivated me to explore new ways to bridge that gap. I became interested in extended reality technology as a tool to simulate real-world situations and capture accurate behavioral data. By integrating this technology into research, we want to better inform clinical decision-making and improve patient outcomes.  

What do you like most about your position or area of work?  

What is so exciting for me is getting to support really interesting and diverse research across such a wide field. A lot of our users are doing neuroscience and psychology research. Some are doing AI research, and some others are more on the rehabilitation science side of things. It's just really exciting to see the kind of work that we're making possible. It's people who have oftentimes never done this kind of research, they never used extended reality paradigms, EEG, or FNIRS before, and we're making it possible for them to do this work. 

Personally, when I was doing my PhD, I think what I enjoyed the most was learning about the interesting work that everyone was doing and not necessarily being the one writing up the findings. So, it's really kind of nice where I've landed because I get to be a science-adjacent and still get to support this exciting work.  

Who did you work with at RSI and what was your research focus? 

My supervisor was Dr. Nancy Salbach, a physical therapist and epidemiologist with post-doctoral training in knowledge translation. Her work is focused on advancing stroke rehabilitation practice and increasing access to community exercise programs for adults with balance and mobility limitations from stroke and other chronic conditions. 

In my experience as a physical therapist, I had many patients with balance and mobility limitations from a stroke or Parkinson's disease who weren't appropriate candidates to join a regular local exercise class because they needed more tailored support. When I met Nancy before starting my PhD, I learned about the Together in Movement and Exercise (TIME) program that she helped develop. TIME is a community-based exercise program for people with balance and mobility limitations involving a unique healthcare-recreation partnership. Within the TIME program, a physical therapist or other qualified clinician is involved in designing and monitoring the exercise program, which is delivered by a trained recreation leader in the community. My PhD research focused on understanding referral patterns of exercise participants into these community-based exercise programs. 

What were some of the greatest highlights of your time at RSI? 

It sounds cheesy, but I think the people were pretty influential, from the staff to my supervisor, lab colleagues, and classmates. I really appreciated the support I got from the RSI administrative and executive teams. I had some personal situations over the course of my PhD, so it wasn't the smoothest road, but there was always a lot of support, which was really nice. On the supervisor side, Nancy is very meticulous, she's an excellent researcher, so I was always confident that whatever I produced was going to be high-quality because she is such a great researcher. I also got very involved in committees and extracurriculars at RSI, particularly in my first two years, so, getting to know my colleagues through those extracurriculars was also really rewarding. 

How has your experience at RSI played a role in preparing you for your career? 

I developed a lot of independence at RSI. When you are working on a PhD, you have support, but there's also times when you just need to figure things out on your own, which is very similar to the start-up environment. You have supporters, you have mentors and advisors, but sometimes you just have to sit down and figure out what to do.  

I think my involvement in various committees and positions through RSI, the fact that I was involved in several at the same time on top of my PhD work, also helped me learn how to manage multiple responsibilities. Many of those activities involved planning events or programs over a long period of time, coordinating teams, and leading people. , so I think that experience is applicable to my current role managing multiple different aspects of the business at Silico Labs.  

On a scientific level, I attended a lot of research talks at RSI and the hospital where I worked, which was really helpful just to learn about different kinds of research and different methods or approaches to answering research questions. That kind of broad scientific knowledge has really allowed me to sit down with a neuroscientist and be comfortable in understanding their project and some of their study design considerations, even though I am not a neuroscientist myself. When we work with a researcher, they know that we're researchers too, which gives us a lot of credibility and trust. So, I think the strong scientific training I got through RSI, even beyond the specific methods that I used in my own research, was really formative for what I'm doing now. 

Were there any specific courses, activities, or experiences during your time at RSI that were particularly impactful? 

My colleague Julia and I started the rehabINK podcast, which was pretty huge. It’s basically a spin-off of the rehabINK magazine, which is a student-led digital publication covering the field of rehabilitation. The idea came about during the COVID-19 pandemic, when we were all kind of looking for something interesting to distract us from what was going on in the world. We got a fair amount of funding for it, so it gave us a nice start and it's still going, which I'm really happy about. I was also involved in the RSI speaker series and awards committees, as well as Leadership Rehab Rounds, which was a new initiative in the rehab sector to bring together students, postdoctoral researchers, faculty, and invited external experts to present their research. 

In terms of courses, I would say the most influential one for me was the KT course that I took with Heather Colquhoun, who was also on my thesis advisory committee. I think it just gave me this appreciation of the gap between research and practice, which led me to where I am today. 

What are your goals for the future and where do you see yourself in 10 years? 

Ten years is a really hard question. The goal is to build our company into something meaningful. Overall, we want to become the go-to platform for behavioral research, not just for virtual reality, but also for augmented reality and mixed reality, including desktop and mobile applications. When someone is designing a behavioral experiment, we want to be the platform that they think about because if that's the case, then we have met our goal of making research easier and faster. 

In the short term, we are looking to expand our team and our network. We want to connect with more researchers across the globe. We're already involved in a couple collaborative research projects, mostly here in Montreal, working with researchers at Mila, Concordia University, and the University of Montreal. So, we’d like to continue to develop more research collaborations where we get to be a little bit more hands-on with the projects.