Hello! I’m Sam Nicholls.

Long-read metagenomics post-doc at University of Birmingham. I reliably move files and tiny liquids around. I invented Monster DNA Lab and make things for Sam and Tom Industrys. I like fries, owls, and free wine.

Say Hello: sam [at] samnicholls [dot] net
See also; @samstudio8

---

Publications

• Ultra-deep, long-read nanopore sequencing of mock microbial community standards
  Nicholls, S.M., Quick, J.C., Tang, S. and Loman, N.J.
  2019. Gigascience, 8(5), p.giz043.
• Exploring the genetic architecture of inflammatory bowel disease by whole-genome sequencing identifies association at ADCY7
  Yang Luo, Katrina M de Lange, Luke Jostins, Loukas Moutsianas, Joshua Randall, Nicholas A Kennedy, Christopher A Lamb, Shane McCarthy, Tariq Ahmad, Cathryn Edwards, Eva Goncalves Serra, Ailsa Hart, Chris Hawkey, John C Mansfield, Craig Mowat, William G Newman, Sam Nichols, Martin Pollard, Jack Satsangi, Alison Simmons, Mark Tremelling, Holm Uhlig, David C Wilson, James C Lee, Natalie J Prescott et al.
  Nature Genetics (2017) 49, 186–192.
• Goldilocks: a tool for identifying genomic regions that are “just right.”
  Nicholls, S. M., Clare, A., & Randall, J. C.
  Bioinformatics (2016) 32 (13): 2047-2049.

Talks

• Genome Informatics, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, Cold Spring Harbor, NY USA
  Detecting microbial transmission and engraftment after faecal microbiota transplants with long-read metagenomics and reticulatus
  November 2019
• JAX Long Read Workshop, Jackson Laboratory, CT USA
  Ultra-deep long-read metagenomics
  September 2019

Pre-Prints

• Nicholls, S.M., Aubrey, W., Edwards, A., De Grave, K., Huws, S., Schietgat, L., Soares, A., Creevey, C.J. and Clare, A., 2019. Recovery of gene haplotypes from a metagenome. BioRxiv, p.223404.
• Edwards, A., Debbonaire, A.R., Nicholls, S.M., Rassner, S.M., Sattler, B., Cook, J.M., Davy, T., Mur, L.A. and Hodson, A.J., 2018. In-field metagenome and 16S rRNA gene amplicon nanopore sequencing robustly characterize glacier microbiota. BioRxiv, p.073965.

Grants

• Aberystwyth University Research Fund 2016
  Extracting exciting commercially exploitable enzymes from metagenomic data sets
  Co-authored £4,500 grant to cover lab and sequencing costs for proof of concept of my PhD algorithm.
• Aberystwyth University Doctoral Career Development Scholarship
  50% PhD fees and stipend awarded by competition
• Aberystwyth University IBERS Scholarship
  50% PhD fees and stipend awarded by IBERS scholarship

Awards

• Runner Up
  Research as Art 2019
  Swansea University
• Best Poster
  2016 Annual IMPACS PhD Conference
  Aberystwyth University. Institute of Mathematics, Physics and Computer Science
• Runner-Up Poster
  Excellence with Impact Poster Presentation
  Aberystwyth University. Institute of Biological, Environmental and Rural Sciences
• Best Student Presentation
  2014 Student Symposium on Computational Biology and Life Sciences, Cardiff
• Best Minor Dissertation Project 2014
  Aberystwyth University. Department of Computer Science
• 2012 O.L. Davies Prize in Statistics
  Aberystwyth University. Department of Mathematics
  Awarded to the undergraduate student with the best performance in Statistics in memory of the Professor Owen L. Davies