Posted: 13th June 2019

Recent Computer Science graduate Daniel Nichol has won the 2019 Reinhart Heinrich Award for his doctoral thesis ‘Understanding Drug Resistance through Computational Models of the Genotype–Phenotype Mapping’. The award is made by the European Society for Mathematical and Theoretical Biology (ESMTB) and will be formally given in a ceremony in Heidelberg in 2020.

The committee who chose to make this award commented, ‘Daniel Nichol’s thesis is likely to become a landmark in an issue of critical significance. It studies and proposes strategies to deal with drug resistance in the treatment of cancers and infectious diseases taking into account the genotype-phenotype mapping. New mathematical models are used to better understand the underlying mapping mechanisms, integrating genetics, environmental signals and stochasticity. The thesis gave rise to three papers already published in highly prestigious journals and to a few more papers under publication.’

Dr Nichol completed his DPhil at University College Oxford. His supervisors were Peter Jeavons (Oxford, Computer Science) and Alexander R. A. Anderson (Moffitt, Integrated Mathematical Oncology).