Essam Khawaja
Curious
about how
things
work.
Essam Khawaja
Calgary, Alberta, CanadaSoftware Engineer; ML; Research
Image & source
Saturn, photographed by Cassini, October 6, 2004. Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute. Resized for the web; monochrome inversion and rotation applied in CSS for the atlas composition.
Contents.
“All men by nature desire to know.”
رَبِّ زِدْنِي عِلْمًا
“My Lord, increase me in knowledge.”
Nice to meet you.
Software Engineer; ML; Research
I’m a Computer Science student at the University of Calgary. I build software, machine learning workflows, and research tools: from medical imaging and computer vision to backend systems and full-stack products.
Calgary, Alberta, Canada UCalgary / Open to 2027 internships
02Research & experiments
Explore the research03A little about me
I’m Essam Khawaja, a Computer Science student at the University of Calgary with a Data Science minor, a Software Engineering concentration, and current honours research. I work across software engineering, machine learning, and applied research.
More about me
- Study
- Bachelor of Science in Computer Science at University of Calgary
- Now
- Honours Research Student at ETHEREAL Lab, University of Calgary
From the notebook
All writingI write about the work while it’s still fresh: the decisions, the experiments, and the things I’d change.
05Experience
The full storyWhere I’ve contributed.
Research labs, student engineering teams, client projects, and data work. I’ve contributed to systems across medical AI, backend development, and robotics simulation.
Open a role for the details- Sept 2026 — PresentCurrent
ETHEREAL Lab, University of CalgaryHonours Research StudentRole notesStudying how communication-partner prompts relate to participant state in AutomaViC interactions.
Calgary, Alberta
- Supervised by Dr. Mea Wang and Dr. Diwakar Krishnamurthy.
- Building an analysis and modelling pipeline for approximately 570 minutes of coded study footage from 37 nonspeaking autistic participants.
- Analysing communication-partner prompt content, participant state, and sequential interaction patterns across study phases.
- Comparing real prompts with generic strategies and exploring adaptive prompting. This is ongoing honours work, with no final model results or publication yet.
PythonNLPSequential dataHuman-in-the-loop - May 2026 - August 2026
MIPSLAB, University of CalgaryMedical AI Research ContributorRole notesContributed to HECKTOR medical-image segmentation and downstream cancer-staging experiments.
Calgary, Alberta
- Worked with PET/CT volumes and a 3D U-Net-based tumour segmentation workflow at the Medical Image Processing and Machine Learning Lab.
- Contributed to preprocessing, tumour-burden and imaging-derived features, downstream prediction, and evaluation.
- Project experiments reported approximately 0.7 segmentation Dice, T-stage balanced accuracy of 0.312 → 0.585, and N-stage balanced accuracy of 0.197 → 0.678.
- These are contributions to team research and approximate project results, rather than sole authorship of the full pipeline.
PythonPyTorchMONAIscikit-learnPET/CT - June 2026 - Present
CalgaryToSpaceSoftware / RF Communications ContributorRole notesHelped connect FrontierSat ground-station telemetry with database and downstream software workflows.
Calgary, Alberta
- Helped develop the database system for data received from the ground-station transceiver.
- Worked on API/database integration around SatNOGS-related ground-station infrastructure.
- The inspected mission-operations code includes Python networking, PostgreSQL connectivity, and paginated telemetry retrieval and beacon-frame handling.
- My contribution is to ground-station software; flight software is outside the scope of this work.
PythonPostgreSQLAPIsSatNOGS
06Contact
Say hello.
I’m open to 2027 internships in software, ML, AI, and research engineering, including technically challenging startup teams. If there’s a good fit, I’d like to hear from you.
syedessamuddin.khawa