Will Nickols

Building secure AI IDEs for data science

Dr. Curtis Huttenhower laboratory, Department of Biostatistics, Harvard Chan Center for the Microbiome in Public Health - Building computational tools to discover abundance- and prevalence-based microbiome associations (maaslin3, available from BioConductor) - Comparing taxonomic assignment tools in environmental microbiomes - Creating software for conditional hypergeometric distributions (chyper, available from CRAN) - 2021 Program for Research in Science and Engineering (PRISE) fellow - 2022 Herchel Smith Undergraduate Science Research Program scholar Dr. Daniel Neafsey laboratory, Department of Immunology and Infectious Disease - Building computational tools to distinguish new vs. persistent malaria infections in longitudinal genotyping data (DINEMITES, available on GitHub) - Collaborating with NIH biostatisticians on monoclonal antibody trials to prevent malaria Dr. Douglas Kwon laboratory, Ragon Institute - Analyzing >4000 publicly available microbiome samples to determine strain sharing of vaginal species - Swab to sequencing whole metagenomic analysis of 400 new samples from a South African cohort

- Prepared original materials for and taught a weekly section to review and expand on class material - Created a final review and held a 3-hour review lecture with guided problem solving - Hosted weekly office hours - In official student evaluations, 44 out of 45 students rated me “Excellent” (the highest rating) overall, and 41 out of 42 students rated my lectures and presentations “Excellent” - Original section and final review material are available from GitHub at github.com/WillNickols/Stat111

- Prepared original materials for and taught a weekly section to review and expand on class material - Created an example midterm from scratch and held a review session in preparation for the class's first midterm - Held multiple weekly office hours - In official student evaluations, 51 out of 55 students rated me “Excellent” (the highest rating) overall, and 47 out of 49 students rated my lectures and presentations “Excellent” - Original section and midterm materials and full evaluations including student comments are available from GitHub at github.com/WillNickols/Stat139

Dr. Kai Zhou lab for mitochondria and aging - Designed and parameterized computational models of proton movement in mitochondria - Developed 3D image analysis methods and statistical workflows for high-throughput protein localization screens - Developed ‘omics pipelines for analyzing mitoribosome data - Developed 2D and 3D methods for visualizing and quantifying mitoribosome conformation changes

Dr. Yunsun Nam laboratory, UT Southwestern Green Center for Reproductive Biology: - With the STARS (Science Teacher Access to Resources at Southwestern) program, I researched DEAD-box helicase binding with RNA G-quadruplexes with Dr. Tri Ngo - Learned laboratory techniques including PCR, western blots, bacteria transformation, Ni-NTA purification, ion exchange chromatography, size exclusion chromatography, electrophoretic mobility shift assays, and crystal tray setting - Presented my research in a UT Southwestern poster session and at a high school presentation

On leave to found Lotas

2024 Department of Statistics Concurrent Masters Award GPA: 4.0

Phi Beta Kappa (Junior 24), Undergraduate Research in the Huttenhower lab, Stat 111 Course Assistant, Stat 139 Course Assistant, Cambridge After School Program, Boston Refugee Youth Enrichment program GPA: 4.0

2020 Valedictorian GPA: 102.64 (weighted average with honors classes up to 105 and all other classes up to 100)