Kesho

I use data to open futures for the people most systems overlook.

Grand Rapids, Michigan By way of Nairobi

I am a data and AI engineer, finishing a master's in data science and analytics this December and a second one in artificial intelligence in 2028, both at Grand Valley State University. I studied mathematics and computer science at JKUAT in Nairobi before that.

Most of my work ends up in the same place, which is the systems that make decisions about people, and whether those systems can be trusted to be right. Schools decide who gets flagged, labor markets decide who gets seen, and public records decide what is true about a person. I build the pipelines and the models, and then I check whether they are telling the truth.

Cynthia Mutua presenting the School Performance Dashboard at the GVSU Charter Schools Office
MIT Blueprint LabsFunded research on teacher retention
Dean's Honor List2025
I Am Grand Valley AwardFor contribution to the university
Open Avenues Build Fellow2026

Everything I build is for tomorrow, and I named it that on purpose.

Kesho is the Swahili word for tomorrow. It is the word I grew up with, and it is the one I use for the part of my life that plans ahead, because the whole point of the work is that somebody's tomorrow gets wider than it was going to be.

The Japanese read the same two characters as ashita, and they build it the same way, which is quietly, in order, with the materials in front of them. I have taken more from that way of working than from any methodology I was ever taught.

明日 Kesho. Ashita. Tomorrow.

Work

Things I built myself, with the numbers they actually produced.

2026 Python, LLM agents, USCIS disclosure data In progress

OPT Career Intelligence Agent

International students apply to employers who have never sponsored a visa, because nobody tells them which ones do. The information is public, in federal H-1B disclosure filings, but it is not in a form anyone can use when they are applying to forty companies in a week.

This is an agentic system that reads those filings and answers the question directly. It is my capstone, and I am looking forward to opening it to the public this year.

CapstoneMaster of science in data science and analytics, 2026
2026 PyTorch

A transformer language model, built from scratch

Eight weeks as an Open Avenues Build Fellow, building and training a GPT-style model end to end, from the tokenizer and byte-pair encoding through the training loop and deployment. I wanted to know how the thing works at the level of the code rather than the level of the diagram.

End to endTokenizer through deployment, nothing borrowed
2026 R, tidymodels

Family engagement and equity

Generalized linear models across 25,391 students, asking whether family engagement protects students differently depending on income.

It does. The protective effect is 18 percent stronger for low-income students, at p = .009, and it held across four separate model specifications, which is the part that made me believe it.

25,391students in the sample
2025 R, Quarto, Census ACS

Poverty and gun violence

Census data merged with more than 100,000 incidents across all fifty states, tested with permutation tests, a 10,000-sample bootstrap, and Welch's t-test.

Poverty predicts the rate of incidents. Population does not, which is the assumption most people start with.

50 statesand more than 100,000 incidents
2025 Python, scikit-learn, mlxtend

Alzheimer's pattern discovery

A knowledge-discovery pipeline over 2,149 patients, reaching 93.8 percent accuracy with an interpretable decision tree rather than a model nobody can read, and validated three different ways.

In clinical work the interpretability is not a nice extra. A doctor has to be able to see why.

93.8%accuracy, from a tree a clinician can read
2025 Python, SQL, BigQuery, Looker

Weather ETL pipeline

A five-phase pipeline moving more than 96,000 records into SQLite and BigQuery, with a live Looker dashboard on the end of it. Ordinary engineering, built properly, which is most of what the job really is.

96,000records, moved and monitored
78schools in the authorizer portfolio I work across
34,000students whose data passes through it
2master's degrees, running at once
3 / 7continents, so far

Research and rooms

Work done with other people, and the places I go to meet them.

2026Third author

Teacher burnout and retention in Michigan charter schools

A study of the conditions teachers actually work in, produced with Dr. Matthew Missias and Basis Policy Research, and funded by MIT Blueprint Labs. A book chapter follows the paper.

BlueprintFunded by MIT Blueprint Labs
2026SubmittedUnder review

Nothing Crashed

A talk about silent integrity failures in a public data pipeline, where a reference table can be wrong for months and never raise a single error. It covers the threat model, what detection coverage looks like in practice, and what it costs to put in.

I submitted it to the Women in Cybersecurity conference and I am looking forward to hearing back.

WiCySProposed for the 2027 conference
2022–2023Nairobi

National curriculum research

At the Kenya Institute of Curriculum Development, through the country's move from the 8-4-4 system to CBC, including work on special needs education. It is where I learned what happens when a decision made in a spreadsheet reaches every school in a country.

NationalKenya Institute of Curriculum Development
Cynthia at the Women in Cybersecurity conference
At Women in Cybersecurity. I go to these rooms on purpose, because the work only travels as far as the people who have heard about it.

Path

How I got here.

2018–2022

JKUAT

Bachelor of science in mathematics and computer science.

Nairobi, Kenya
2022–2023

Kenya Institute of Curriculum Development

Research analyst on the national curriculum transition and on inclusive education.

Nairobi, Kenya
2024 to now

Grand Valley State University

Master of science in data science and analytics, finishing December 2026, and a master of science in artificial intelligence through 2028. Graduate assistant data scientist in the Charter Schools Office, where I do the data engineering, build the Power BI reporting, and work on the research side with Blueprint Labs.

Grand Rapids, Michigan
Ahead

Thesis

A master's thesis in artificial intelligence, which I begin in Winter 2027 with Dr. Yong Zhuang advising. I am still choosing the topic and I am enjoying that part.

Grand Rapids, Michigan

Beyond the data

The rest of it, which is not separate from the work.

ElsewhereStrings, sound, books, altitude

I am learning the shamisen, the three-stringed Japanese lute that is played with a bachi, a heavy fan-shaped plectrum you strike the skin with as much as the strings, so the instrument is half percussion. I took it up alongside sound and frequency work, and both of them do the same thing for me, which is give my hands and my attention somewhere to go that is not a screen. I have found that an hour of either one settles me more reliably than anything else I have tried.

I am learning the piano more slowly, and the three pieces I am working on are Yiruma's River Flows in You, Ludovico Einaudi's I Giorni, and Collabo. I am reading Braiding Sweetgrass, by Robin Wall Kimmerer, who is a botanist and a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, and who argues that indigenous knowledge and scientific method are two careful ways of paying attention rather than rivals. That idea has changed how I think about my own field.

I do yoga, I watch a lot of anime, and I will say yes to most things that involve height or speed. I have been to three continents and I intend to see all seven. I pray, and my faith is the part of my week that makes the rest of it carry.

Administrative Officer, Graduate Student Association

Treasurer, Women in Computing

Resident Advisor

Member, Women in STEM

Cynthia with a friend at her doctoral hooding ceremony at UC Davis
At a friend's doctoral hooding. I turn up for other people's milestones, because somebody turned up for mine.
Cynthia on the water with the Manhattan skyline behind her
New York, on the water. Three continents down and four to go.
Cynthia sitting on an iron throne sculpture
Height, speed, and the occasional throne.
Cynthia and two friends on a tree-lined road
My people. Most of what I know about the world I learned from someone who grew up somewhere I did not.