Most people call me Nick.

I completed my undergraduate studies at Harvard College with a bachelor’s degree in Human Evolutionary Biology with magna cum laude distinction. In addition, I completed an undergraduate thesis on the evolution of chimpanzee growth patterns under the direction of Zarin Machanda and Richard Wrangham, for which I earned Highest Honors and the Thomas T. Hoopes Prize. Following this, I spent nine months on a Fulbright Scholarship studying chimpanzees in the Kanyawara forest with the Kibale Chimpanzee Project. I then matriculated with the University of North Carolina Medical Scientist Training Program (MD/PhD Program).

At UNC, I completed my PhD in Epidemiology from the Gillings School of Global Public Health, focusing on infectious diseases. My dissertation work was completed under Jonathan Juliano and the late Steven Meshnick, as part of the IDEEL@UNC group. The work focused on the molecular, spatial, and genetic distribution of malaria in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, alongside broader antimalarial resistance and malaria genetic relatedness work and was supported by an NIH F30 Grant.

In 2020, I joined Imperial College London as a research associate and soon onboarded onto the Imperial College COVID-19 Response Team. My work focused on re-estimating the infection fatality ratio using statistical modeling with a Bayesian approach under the direction of Robert Verity, Lucy Okell, Azra Ghani, and Neil Ferguson.

While interviewing for medical residency positions, I worked as a part-time reseach consultant on a Predictive Intelligence for Pandemic Prevention grant with the TriCEM organization. My work focused on exploring what contact network features make pandemic prediction difficult and if we could leverage AI/ML agent-based epidemiological models for better prediction under the direction of David Rasmussen, Charlie Nunn, and others.

I completed my MD/PhD program in May 2023 and started as a resident physician at Duke Hospitals in July 2023 as part of a Physician Scientist Training Program pathway with Internal Medicine and subspecialty training in Infectious Diseases.

In the long-term, I plan on pursuing a career as a physician-scientist, with a focus on global health and infectious diseases. I hope to serve the historically underserved both domestically and globally as a physician and infectious disease epidemiologist, with a computational and molecular interest. I am also interested in using evolving ML/AI techniques to improve health, decrease physician burden, and promote equitable access to care.

When I am not in the hospital or sitting in front of my computer coding, I can be found playing with my son, hiking, or traveling. Once upon a time, I was also a wrestler, which I still love to do from time to time. However, most of my current athletic pursuits involve trying to keep up with my wife, Katelyn Rittenhouse (who is also an amazing global women’s health researcher: please check out her amazing work).