About

Nicole Nova is a PhD student in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Stanford University. Nicole is co-advised by Dr. Erin Mordecai and Dr. Dmitri Petrov, and she combines mathematical modeling with empirical work to study the ecology and evolution of infectious diseases in wildlife. Nicole applies theory from subfields such as population dynamics, population genetics, eco-evolutionary dynamics, and comparative genomics to study viral adaptation and cross-species transmission (spillover) in large carnivores (e.g., wolves and bears). She also studies climate drivers of infectious disease dynamics, and environmental predictors of pathogen sharing across taxa. Nicole aims to promote health, biodiversity, conservation of large carnivores and the ecosystem services these top predators provide.

Nicole grew up next to Tyresta National Park in Sweden, and she enjoys spending time in nature (hiking, canoeing, swimming and horseback riding).

Preliminary thesis title: Ecological and evolutionary drivers of emerging wildlife diseases in humans and large carnivores
Committee: Giulio De Leo, Marcus Feldman, Elizabeth Hadly, Erin Mordecai, and Dmitri Petrov

Résumé/CV

Outreach

Research Science Institute (RSI)

RSI is a summer research program for high school students at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and co-sponsored by the Center for Excellence in Education (CEE). Nicole attended RSI as a student in 2007 and she worked with Prof. Jeremy Wolfe in the Visual Attention Lab in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women's Hospital. She was investigating whether a simple search task (i.e. looking for a green line among red lines) was correlated with the search for objects in the real world, in particular, the search for weapons in airport security (X-ray images of luggage). The work was later published in the Journal of Vision. As an RSI alum, Nicole has been involved with the RSI program for several years and served as the Director of RSI in 2016. For more information, see the CEE Alumni Spotlight press release page (see PDF).

Research Academy for Young Scientists (Rays)

Rays is a summer research program for high school students, similar to Research Science Institute (RSI), but located in Sweden and it was founded in 2011. The first couple of years were run by Swedish RSI alumni (including Nicole), before Rays alumni could also hold staff positions. Mentorships are being held at various universities in Stockholm, such as Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm University and the Royal Institute of Technology. After a summer-long internship in a research lab, the Rays students present their projects in the Swedish Museum of Science and Technology.

Background

In 2012, Nicole earned a degree in dental surgery from Karolinska Institutet in Sweden. As an EU Erasmus Mundus scholar, she also studied at Queen Mary University of London as an exchange student in 2011. Nicole also earned a M.Sc. and she completed her Master's thesis in the Molecular Pain Lab in the Department of Physiology and Pharmacology and the Department of Oral Physiology at Karolinska Institutet. Her thesis was on the pathophysiology of chronic pain in rheumatoid arthritis studied in vivo using a mouse model (more information can be found here).

Nicole also completed a clinical internship in the Department of Head and Neck Surgery at the Medical University of Vienna in Austria in 2010. She worked on several head and neck cancer cases and became interested in the evolution of cancer on a cell population level. That spark of interest led her to the field of evolutionary medicine, and eventually to the broader field of ecology and evolutionary biology.

During her years of clinical work and biomedical research, she became fascinated by mathematical biology and how one could build mathematical models to run in silico experiments (computer simulations), which could replace time-consuming, expensive and/or infeasible empirical studies. She obtained her quantitative foundation by studying electrical engineering at the Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden. On the left, there 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, Department of Biostatistics and Computational Biology at 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 and progression using theories from evolutionary dynamics, population genetics and stochastic processes.

Then, she worked as a Research Associate in the Koelle Research Group in the Department of Biology at Duke University. She formulated a mathematical model to study the development of broadly neutralizing antibodies (BnAbs) in chronic HIV-infections. Understanding the co-evolution between the potent BnAbs and HIV could potentially provide useful insights for developing effective HIV vaccines.