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; my research pages have publications in topical groups. My Neuroimaging Tips & Tricks blog has practical tips for neuroimaging researchers.

News

• Come join us! Job opportunity, Research Fellow in Informatics for Neuroimaging Meta-Analysis, closing soon, 21 June 2013!
• Posters and talk slides from my group and collaborators at the Organization for Human Brain Mapping 2013 conference, 16-20 June.
• Recent blog posts on FWHM & RESEL details for SPM and FSL, Standardizing DVARS and What are the units in plots in SPM?.
• New script for FSL PlotFeatMFX, used to understand the impact of the FLAME mixed effects group model and compare it to the results obtained with OLS.
• Full talk slides now available for the "Where's your signal?" workshop from OHBM 2012, as well as the Imaging Genetics educational course; all posters and slides presented by group at OHBM 2012 are also available.
• Unraveling Mental Disorders with Neuroimaging, was a joint Warwick-Fudan workshop organized by myself and Jianfeng Feng, held at Fudan University, Shanghai, 18-20 June, 2012, following the Beijing OHBM meeting.

Recent Presentations:

• Poster presented at the 2013 International Imaging Genetics Conference, in Irvine, CA, Voxel-wise and Cluster-based Heritability Inferences of fMRI Data.
• 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 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"

Recent Publications:

• "Increasing power for voxel-wise genome-wide association studies: The random field theory, least square kernel machines and fast permutation procedures", NeuroImage 63(2):858–873, fast, accurate and powerful inference for whole-brain, whole-genome imaging genetics studies.
• "A Bayesian non-parametric Potts model with application to pre-surgical FMRI data", Stat Methods Med Res, a spatial mixture model for thresholding unsmoothed data, useful for clinical fMRI.
• "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.
• "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.
• 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

Past Teaching:

• Term 1 2012/13Applied Biostatistics, ST416 (I'm teaching the 1st part of this 3-module course)
• Term 2 2012/13 Probabilistic and Statistical Inference, CO902 (Complexity MSc course)

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.

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
Web: http://go.warwick.ac.uk/tenichols
Blog: Neuroimaging Tips & Tricks

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