Portfolio

Work Experience

AI Engineer

Gameplay Engineer

Research

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Unmeasured Spatial Risk in Disease Modeling
A Topological Data Analysis Approach

Oak Ridge National Laboratory & University of Tennessee, USA
Topological Data Analysis, Bayesian Hirachical Modeling, MCMC, NUTS, PyMC
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Identifying Spatiotemporal Patterns in Opioid Vulnerability
A Spatial Kalman Filter Approach

Published Research (BMC Public Health 2026)
Kalman Filtering, Spatiotemporal Modeling, Geospatial Analysis
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A Geospatial Study of Opioid Overdose Risk
Topological Data Analysis + Deep Learning

Published Research (IJPDS 2024)
Topological Data Analysis, Persistence Images, SE-ResNet, PyTorch
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Tampering & Sound-Based IoT Framework
Real-Time Steel Cargo Theft Detection

Research (AHEAD ICE Grant)
IoT, Embedded Systems, Deep Learning, Audio Classification

Publications

Unmeasured Spatial Risk in Disease Modeling: A Topological Data Analysis Approach 2026

Manuscript in preparation

H. Fernando. Manuscript in preparation, 2026.

Identifying spatiotemporal patterns in opioid vulnerability: investigating the links between disability, prescription opioids and opioid-related mortality 2025

BMC Public Health 25, no. 1 (2025): 1759

A. Deas, H. Fernando, A. Heidi, A. Kapadia, J. Trafton, A. Spannaus, V. Maroulas.

A Geospatial Study of Opioid Overdose Risk in Diverse Regions 2024

Conference Proceedings for International Population Data Linkage Conference, vol. 9, no. 5

H. Fernando, A. Spannaus, A. Kapadia.

Game Jams

Projects

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Marketing Mix Modeling
A Study of Confounding and Experimental Calibration

Independent Research - University of Tennessee
Bayesian MMM, Causal Inference, PyMC-Marketing, Synthetic Data
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Unsupervised Leaf Vein Segmentation
W-Net for Plant Phenotyping

Deep Learning - University of Tennessee
W-Net, Unsupervised Segmentation, PyTorch
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Spatial-TDA
A Python Package for Geospatial Topological Data Analysis

Open-Source Python Package
PyPI, conda-forge, GeoPandas, Gudhi, Persistent Homology
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Segmenting and Classifying Clinical Notes
NLP + Topological Data Analysis on MIMIC-III

Data Engineering - University of Tennessee
BioClinicalBERT, Doc2Vec, TF-IDF, Mapper (TDA), Hierarchical Clustering
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Automatic Bird Sound Identification
Deep Learning & Transfer Learning on 397 Species

MSc Independent Project - University of Peradeniya, Sri Lanka
ResNet Transfer Learning, Mel-Spectrograms

Education

M.S. Statistics
2022 – 2026
Haslam College of Business, University of Tennessee, Knoxville · Knoxville, TN GPA: 4.00 / 4.00
Ph.D-Dropout Data Science and Engineering (DSE)
2022 – 2026
Bredesen Center, University of Tennessee, Knoxville · Knoxville, TN GPA: 4.00 / 4.00
M.S. Data Science
2020 – 2022
Postgraduate Institute of Science, University of Peradeniya · Sri Lanka GPA: 3.75 / 4.00
B.Sc. Statistics and Operations Research
2015 – 2018
Faculty of Science, University of Peradeniya · Sri Lanka

Certificates

Technical Skills

Languages
R Python SQL Spark C/C++ Java
Statistics & Methods
Marketing Mix Modeling Causal Inference Regression Bayesian Hierarchical & Spatial Modeling Mixed-Effects Models Machine Learning MCMC Deep Learning NLP LLMs Operations Research Topological Data Analysis
Data & Databases
SQL & Relational Databases Data Extraction / ETL Data Cleaning & QA REST / Web APIs Spark
Dashboards & Visualization
Shiny Tableau Looker (Data Studio) React
Frameworks & Tools
PyTorch TensorFlow scikit-learn RStudio Git GCP AWS Slurm Docker PySpark

Interests

Marketing Mix Modeling Causal Inference Bayesian Modeling Machine Learning & Deep Learning Spatial Statistics Topological Data Analysis NLP & Large Language Models Healthcare & Public Health High-Performance Computing