Thomas Nichols is a Principal Research Fellow and Head of Neuroimaging Statistics at the Institute for Digital Healthcare, holding a joint position between Warwick Manufacturing Group & the Department of Statistics. Before joining the University of Warwick he was the Director of Modelling & Genetics at the GlaxoSmithKline Clinical Imaging Centre at Hammersmith Hospital in London, where he worked on statistical methods for fMRI in the context of clinical trials, and integrating genetic data into brain image analyses. Before coming to the UK he was an Associate Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Michigan, and in 2001 received his Ph.D. in statistics from Carnegie Mellon University where he also trained in cognitive neuroscience. He has been active in the field of functional neuroimaging since 1992, when he worked at the University of Pittsburgh's PET Center as a programmer and statistician. Dr. Nichols' research focuses on modelling and inference of neuroimaging data, including PET, fMRI & M/EEG. For a full list of publications please see my CV, or my Google Scholar page.

News

• PhD studentship in Imaging Genetics available, on a joint project between Warwick and University of Maryland Baltimore.
• Identification of common variants associated with human hippocampal and intracranial volumes, a Nature Genetics letter that is the result of the ENIGMA consortium, working to conduct GWAS studies on brain imaging phenotypes using over 9000 subjects combining studies from around the world.
• Unraveling Mental Disorders with Neuroimaging, a joint Warwick-Fudan workshop organized by myself and Jianfeng Feng. It will be held at Fudan University, Shanghai, 18-20 June, 2012, timed to immediately follow the Beijing OHBM meeting.
• Multiple testing corrections, nonparametric methods, and Random Field Theory, a review of fMRI inference for the special issue of NeuroImage celebrating the 20th anniversary of fMRI.
• New and newly updated scripts for FSL, including fsl_fdr.sh an improved interface to FSL's fdr tool.

Current Teaching:

• Applied Biostatistics, ST416 (I'm teaching the 3rd part of this 3-module course)

Recent Presentations:

• Slides now available from the GlaxoSmithKline-Neurophysics Workshop on Pharmacological MRI, held here in Warwick 23 & 24 January, 2012.
• My talk from the OHBM morning workshop "Imaging Genetics: Multivariate Analyses for Neural and Genetic Circuitry" From Univariate to Multivariate imaging Genetic Analyses.
• Talks from the OHBM 2011 Imaging Genetics OHBM Educational Course.
• Talks from the OHBM morning workshop, "How To Be a Skeptical Neuroimager: Functional Connectivity & Causal Modeling"
• My talk from the Advanced fMRI course, "Finding Activations: Power, Specificity, and Selection Bias"
• My posters at OHBM 2011

Recent Publications:

• www.NeuroSynth.org, a lexigraphically-based neuroimaging meta-analysis tool using over 4000 studies is now live. (Based on recent work by Yarkoni et al, 2011).
• P Kochunov, DC Glahn, TE Nichols, AM Winkler, et al. Genetic analysis of cortical thickness and fractional anisotropy of water diffusion in the brain. Frontiers in Neuroscience 5, 2011.
  
  
  
• Ginestet CE, Nichols TE, Bullmore ET, Simmons A. Brain Network Analysis: Separating Cost from Topology Using Cost-Integration. PLoS ONE 6(7), e21570, 2011.
  
  
  
• Salimi-Khorshidi G, Smith SM, Nichols TE. Adjusting the effect of nonstationarity in cluster-based and TFCE inference. NeuroImage, 54(3):2006-19, 2011. doi
• Yarkoni T, Poldrack RA, Nichols TE, Van Essen DC, Wager TD. Large-scale automated synthesis of human functional neuroimaging data. Nature Methods, 8:665–670, 2011. Preprint: Paper Supplementary Materials. See also Commentary by Tom Mitchell, From journal articles to computational models: a new automated tool.
  
  
  
• Vounou M, Nichols TE, Montana G; Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative. Discovering genetic associations with high-dimensional neuroimaging phenotypes: A sparse reduced-rank regression approach. Neuroimage, 53(3):1147-59, 2010. doi
• Kriegeskorte, Lindquist, Nichols, Poldrack, & Vul. Everything you never wanted to know about circular analysis – but were afraid to ask. J. of Cerebral Blood Flow & and Metabolism, 30(9):1551-7, 2010. Pre Print doi

Collaborations

• I am part of the Washington University - University of Minnesota Human Connectome Project, an ambitious international consortium focused on mapping the structural and functional connections in the human brain. I am working on the imaging genetics component of this study, which will image twins and their siblings, allowing the estimation of heritability of connectivity measures.

Lectures on Spatial Point Processes

• As part of a CRiSM lecture series, Dr. Tim Johnson gave a set of three lectures on point processes, with practical details on how to build Bayesian models and samplers for these types of data. Lecuture notes for all three lectures: PDF

Recently Released

• SnPM8, the Statistical Nonparametric Mapping toolbox for SPM8 has been released, 7 July, 2010. See the SnPM page for more.

Neuroimaging Tips & Tricks

• Visit my blog on Neuroimaging Tips & Tricks, an extension of the John's (SPM software) Gems pages I started almost 10 years ago.

Neuroimaging
Statistics

Contact Info

Room D0.03
Deptment of Statistics
University of Warwick
Coventry
CV4 7AL
United Kingdom

Tel: +44(0)24 761 51086
Email: T.E.Nichols 'at' warwick.ac.uk

Handbook of fMRI Data Analysis by Russ Poldrack, Thomas Nichols and Jeanette Mumford