Ahomagai

Abhishesh Homagain

(647) 505-2111 | abh.homagain@gmail.com | Ahomagai.github.io

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Skills and Qualifications

• 4+ years of experience with Python (NumPy, Pandas, Matplotlib, scikit-learn), R, and Tableau for hypothesis testing, data analysis, and visualization

• Knowledge and expertise in applying data science theories, principles, best practices and advanced analytics for data modelling, data mining, statistical modelling and evidence-informed decision-making including development of end-to-end machine learning pipelines

• 3+ years of experience conducting and synthesizing clinical research using qualitative and quantitative methods with a strong focus on study design and clinically meaningful interpretation of findings

• Student leader experienced in communicating findings, insights, and recommendations to non-technical stakeholders, making complex concepts accessible to diverse audiences

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Work Experience

Doctoral Candidate | University of Waterloo | Waterloo, ON
Sep 2022 – Current

• Conducting mixed-methods clinical research to synthesize qualitative and quantitative evidence on how Parkinson’s Disease impacts patient quality of life, supporting the evaluation of patient-centered outcomes and clinical tools
• Evaluating the internal and external validity, reliability, and clinical utility of assessment tools used to measure motor symptom severity in Parkinson’s disease across treatment states
• Developing and evaluating machine learning models using multimodal sensor data to support early detection of clinically meaningful motor symptoms, with emphasis on model interpretabilit

Vice President | UW Graduate Student Association (GSA) | Waterloo, ON May 2025 – Current

• Leading the administration arm of the GSA, managing student events and elections
• Advising, consluting, and negotiating with UWaterloo leadership committees through evidence-informed analysis on matters pertaining to the improvement of student experience such as minimum funding, academic policies etc.

Graduate Peer Tutor | UW Writing and Communication Center | Waterloo, ON
Jan 2023 – December 2025

• Advised graduate students in their writing and communication projects, from brainstorming to
  proofreading of thesis work, course assignments, and manuscripts

• Guided undergraduate students with their course assignments, asking probing questions and
  providing feedback to improve their work

Council Speaker | UW Graduate Student Association | Waterloo, ON
May 2024 – April 2025

• Chaired the graduate student council, was responsible for advising and collaborating with the Board and
  President of the GSA on matters of concern, advocacy, and direction of the GSA

• Advised and facilitated discussion within leadership committees of the University of Waterloo on
  matters pertaining to graduate student experience (funding, academic policies etc.)

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Projects

• Deadliness in mass shootings: What factors determine deadliness of a mass shooting incident in
  the United States? (R)

  • Used data from the Violence Project to determine whether factors such as gun law strictness, gun
    ownership, political party affiliation, link to hate groups etc. affected the deadliness of a mass
    shooting incident

• Emergency room readmission: Prediction of high-frequency users of emergency departments using
  MIMICIII dataset & various machine learning models (SQL & Python)

  • Compared and optimized various ML models (XGBoost, Ensemble, SVM etc.) to identify the best performing model that predicted high frequency users of emergency departments

• Three parties of Ontario: Insights into 2018 and 2022 provincial elections (Tableau & Python)

  • Compared Ontario provincial election results and highlighted insights from the 2018 and 2022
    results across the three major parties, creating interactive geospatial maps of riding outcomes

• Wrangling Chess: Analyzing first move advantage and most common first move in chess (R)

  • Used R and Lichess.com to extract and wrangle unstructured text into usable tabular data and
    performed linear regressions to calculate first move ELO advantage and most common move

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Education

PhD Candidate, Kinesiology – Neuroscience, University of Waterloo
2022 - Current
PhD Thesis: Emotions, environments, and freezing of gait in Parkinson’s Disease

MSc, Kinesiology – Neuroscience, University of Waterloo
2020 - 2022
MSc Thesis: How do emotions affect gait?

BSc, Honors Kinesiology (Co-op), University of Waterloo
2015 - 2020

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Graduate Research

Publications

Emotions affect steady-state walking performance, PLOS ONE, Accepted September 14, 2023

Presentations

• Conference Poster Presentations

• Title: Characterizing how different subtypes of freezers performed on the new clinician reported outcome for freezing of gait, International Society for Posture and Gait Research (ISPGR), Maastricht, Netherlands, July 2025

• Title: Postural instability relates to autonomic dysfunction in Parkinson’s Disease, International
  Congress of Parkinson’s Disease and Movement Disorders, Philadelphia, USA, September 2024

• Title: Emotions affect walking performance, International Brain Research Organization (IBRO),
  Granada, Spain, September 2023

• Title: Gait differences in virtual and real-life laboratory environments, International Society for
  Posture and Gait Research (ISPGR), Montreal, Canada, July 2022

• Research Talks

• Semi-finalist, Three-minute thesis (3MT) ISPGR 2021 (COVID postponed)

• Winner, Departmental 3MT competition, Faculty of Health, University of Waterloo

• Thesis Talk, Research Day, Center for Theoretical Neuroscience (CTN), University of Waterloo

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Teaching Experience

• Graduate Teaching Assistant – Graduate, Research Design and Statistical Analysis (2026)

• Guest Lecturer - Graduate, Research Design and Statistical Analysis - Introduction to Machine Learning (2026)

• Guest Lecturer – Undergraduate, Cognition, Cognitive Dysfunction, and Movement (2024)

• Graduate Teaching Assistant – Undergraduate, Human Anatomy (2021, 2023)

Extra-Curriculars

Core Member | WATOLINK | University of Waterloo | June 2025 – Current

• Developing machine learning models to control external hand prosthesis using electromyography (EMG)

Member | Senate Graduate Research Committee | University of Waterloo | May 2024 – Current

• Represented the Faculty of Health as a voting member of the SGRC, providing input and
  recommendations to senate regarding changes in academic programs, finance, graduate courses etc.

Hacker | Hack the North | September 2023

• Created a working prototype of a single camera-based gait analysis tool, using OpenCV in Python