🥳 Welcome!

👋 About

I’m Cynthia Nyongesa (“Nyo-nge-sa”), and I’m a 3rd Year Doctoral student in the Neurosciences Graduate Program at UC San Diego. I also was a teachers assistant for the Winter 200B: Basic Neurosciences: System Neurobiology (NEU 200B) course and run the African Graduate Students Association at UCSD – take a look at our awesome projects here.

I graduated with BS and MS degrees in Neuroscience from Pomona College & UC San Diego in 2019 and 2023, respectively. There, I was advised by Dr. Richard Lewis and Dr. Judy Pa to help develop statistical tools to optimize high-dimensional clinical data in Python & C#. I’m originally from Nairobi, Kenya 🇰🇪.

Feel free to email me at cnyongesa@ucsd.edu or check out the resources listed below.

🎓 Education

Ph.D. | Computational Neuroscience,Expected Sep ‘26 UC San Diego, CA


Dissertation: Using Multimodal Machine Learning Methods to Develop Digital Biomarkers in Aging
Advisor: Judy Pa, PhD

M.Sc. | Computational Neuroscience, May ‘23
UC San Diego, CA


Thesis: Language-Based Disease Detection: Bridging AI and Speech for Early Intervention in Alzheimer’s. Cumulative GPA: 3.97

B.A. | Neurosciences, May ‘19 Pomona College, Claremont, CA

Thesis: Using Computer Vision to Monitor Autism Spectrum Disorders Advisor: Richard Lewis, Ph.D Cumulative GPA: 3.61

👩🏽‍🏫 Work Experience

Graduate Student Researcher/Programming Intern @ Alzheimer’s Disease Cooperative Study, San Diego, CA (Oct 2022 – Present)

• Utilizing NumPy for python for data analysis on virtual reality acclimation trial data, reducing motion sickness risk by 20% and conducting research on virtual reality-based cognitive training and applied natural language processing in OpenAI, NLK and spaCy for Alzheimer’s speech analysis.
• Employing C# for assessing salient and non-salient signals in way-finding VR tasks using eye tracking and pupillometry metrics. Advised by Dr. Judy Pa, PhD.

📝 Scholarships

• United World College Davis Leadership Full Tuition Scholarship
• Summer Undergraduate Research Program (SURP), Pomona College

🏆 Awards

• The Alzheimer’s Association International Conference (AAIC) Speaker Fellowship
• Pomona College President’s Funding Recipient
• Graduate & Professional Student Associations: EDI Fellowship
• United World College Costa Rica Research Fellowship