Tony E. Astuhuaman Davila

Graduate Research Assistant at PAMS Department
Founder and Vice president - MoState ACM Student Chapter

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Bio

I’m Tony Astuhuaman, a Computer Science graduate from Missouri State University and a Master’s student in Natural and Applied Science with a focus on Materials Science and Computer Science.

During my undergraduate years, I worked in two research labs: the Security and Artificial Intelligence Lab (SAIL), where I focused on computer vision and virtual technology, and the Computational Learning Systems Lab (CLS), where I worked on bioinformatics and data science. In the summer of 2023, I strengthened my AI foundations by taking CS221 at Stanford University. These experiences led to my first publication at IEEE CIBCB 2024, where I received the Best Paper Award.

As a Graduate Assistant in the PAMS department, I conduct research in AI for drug design, with an emphasis on automating molecular docking and lead optimization. In 2025, I successfully passed my thesis defense, and in 2026, I presented my thesis research at APS and received the Outstanding Research Assistant award.

In September 2025, I began a part-time internship at City Utilities, where I continue building practical engineering experience alongside research. Outside the lab, I enjoy hackathons such as HackHarvard (Top 3 in the Accessibility Track), the UC Berkeley AI Hackathon, and TreeHacks at Stanford University.

news

May 1, 2026 Received the Outstanding Research Assistant award.
Apr 14, 2026 Passed my thesis defense.
Mar 18, 2026 Presented my thesis research at APS.
Sep 8, 2025 Started a part-time internship at City Utilities.
Dec 18, 2024 I have been accepted into the most prestigious hackathon TreeHacks 2025.

latest posts

selected publications

  1. Real-Time Hand Gesture Recognition for Drone Control Using Deep Learning
    Tony Enrique Astuhuaman Davila, and Mohammed Y. Belkhouche
    CNAS Spring Symposium, 2023
  2. Towards Explainability of Dimension Reduction Methods for Machine Learning
    Tony Enrique Astuhuaman Davila, and Tayo Obafemi-Ajayi
    IEEE CIBCB, 2024