Inesa Benedictovna Kozlovskaya: expert on motor control and space medicine

Inesa Benedictovna Kozlovskaya was born in Harbin in China. Her father, Benedict (Benecian) Kozlovsky, administered the Soviet consulate. In 1938 the family moved to Moscow and in 1945 Kozlovskaya became a student at the First Moscow Medical Institute (now the IM Sechenov First Moscow State Medical University). On graduating she entered a doctorate programme at the department of normal physiology, and in 1955 defended her dissertation, On the Impact of Higher Parts of Nervous System on Morphological Composition of Blood in Animals. She then worked as an assistant professor at the department under the guidance of the Soviet physiologists Piotr Anokhin and Mikhail Usievich. In 1959 she moved to the Institute of Higher Nervous Activity and worked at the laboratory of Georgy Skipin, who studied instrumental conditioning. Skipin was a friend of Jerzy Konorski from the Nencki Institute of Experimental Biology in Warsaw.