Nicole Nova is a Ph.D. candidate in Biology (Ecology and Evolution track), an M.S. student in Statistics, a Data Science Scholar and a P.E.O. Scholar at Stanford University. Nicole is co-advised by Prof. Erin Mordecai and Prof. Dmitri Petrov, and she is a member of the Program for Disease Ecology, Health and the Environment and the Program for Conservation Genomics.

Nicole combines mathematical modeling with statistics and data science to study the ecology, evolution and emergence of infectious diseases in humans and wildlife. She uses approaches from disease ecology, population dynamics, phylodynamics, population genetics, eco-evolutionary dynamics, and comparative genomics to study pathogen adaptation and cross-species transmission, i.e., spillover (COVID-19 is a novel spillover example). She also studies climate drivers of infectious disease dynamics, and environmental predictors of pathogen sharing across taxa.

In general, her research focuses on how global change impacts environmental health, and gives rise to emerging infectious diseases threatening public health and wildlife conservation. The goal of her research is to find environmentally sustainable win-win solutions for health and conservation (based on the concept of EcoHealth, One Health, and Planetary Health). Nicole aims to protect and promote health, biodiversity, and conservation through research and policy.

Before Nicole enrolled at Stanford, she completed her undergraduate and graduate studies in dental surgery at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden. Nicole also conducted biomedical research, and completed a Master's thesis on the pathophysiology of chronic pain in rheumatoid arthritis. This was conducted in the Molecular Pain Lab in collaboration with the Department of Physiology and Pharmacology and the Department of Oral Physiology at Karolinska Institutet (more information can be found here).

Nicole also studied abroad for a semester at Queen Mary University of London as an EU Erasmus Mundus scholar, and completed a clinical summer internship at the Department of Head and Neck Surgery, Medical University of Vienna, Austria. She worked on several head and neck cancer cases and became interested in the development of cancer at the cell population level. That spark of interest led her to study ecology and evolutionary biology, and its useful applications in medicine, public health, and planetary health.

Nicole decided to pursue a career in research after her first forays into academic research at Karolinska Institutet, Harvard and MIT as a high school student. She also wanted to combine research with clinical practice as a surgeon to help advance medicine and improve health. In her early career as a surgeon, Nicole became frustrated that she and other clinicians were often treating cases that were (or ultimately became) beyond repair. Most medical treatments were temporary and often had side effects, whereas Nicole's desire was to prevent many diseases at their origin. For example, the underlying cause of cancer or an emerging infectious disease is the spontaneous mutation of a single cell or pathogen. The progression of the disease is driven by complex evolutionary and ecological processes inside the body and outside in the environment. Thus, Nicole decided to pursue Ph.D. studies in ecology and evolutionary biology in order to seek sustainable solutions for disease prevention.

The study of complex evolutionary and ecological processes is highly quantitative. Throughout her life, Nicole developed a strong affinity for mathematics, and became fascinated by mathematical biology and its applications in medicine by modeling ecological and evolutionary processes. To strengthen her quantitative foundation, she completed coursework in mathematics and computer science at the Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden (here is a video of a robot that she and a team of engineering students built using Segway technology).

In 2014, Nicole started working in the Michor Lab at the Department of Biostatistics and Computational Biology, Dana-Farber/Harvard Cancer Center (Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Harvard Medical School and Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health). She worked on mathematical modeling of cancer development using theories from evolutionary dynamics and population genetics.

In 2015, Nicole started working as a Research Associate in the Koelle Research Group in the Department of Biology at Duke University. There she studied eco-evolutionary dynamics of infectious diseases. She formulated a mathematical model that captured the development of broadly neutralizing antibodies (BnAbs) in chronic HIV-infections. This allowed her to study the within-host co-evolution between BnAbs and HIV, which could potentially provide useful insights for developing effective HIV vaccines.

This journey led her to study the ecology and evolution of infectious diseases using mathematical and statistical modeling at Stanford. Over the years studying ecology and evolution, Nicole became more aware of the synergies between health and conservation. Climate change, habitat destruction, deforestation and poaching often threaten not only natural ecosystems, wildlife, and endangered species, but also human health. For example, spillover of emerging infectious diseases from wildlife to humans (e.g., SARS, Nipah, Hendra, MERS, and most recently, COVID-19) has increased over the years as a consequence of human encroachment into wild habitats, damaged ecosystems, species removal, illegal hunting, and/or poor living conditions of captive wild animals and domestic animals. Raised next to a horse farm and a nature preserve in the Swedish woods, Nicole has always been passionate about helping animals, and understands the value of preserving nature. Nicole's mission is to protect nature and prevent future pandemics via sustainable win-win solutions for public health and conservation of wildlife.