"Nick is one of the most outstanding multi-talented PhD student I have trained in my 23 years at UCSF. He is creative, extremely competent, intelligent, hard-working, kind and a superb successful mentor. He has been awarded an NCI F31 fellowship and a Phi Beta Kappa Northern California Reed scholarship, and last week I nominated him for our UCSF Dean’s mentoring award. Thus far he has co-authored 5 publications, has one co-authorship that is accepted for publication at Cell, a second-authorship under review at Nature, and his first-author manuscript is under revision after review at Nature Genetics. Nick solves problems for many people in my lab and the neighboring labs on our floor. He is gifted at the bench but also solves computational problems and dabbles in AI-related tools (recently installed and uses AlphaFold, for example). He has also fixed many pieces of equipment, saving my lab tens of thousands in repair.

Nick is one of the most caring, dedicated, and effective mentors I have encountered. Nick’s mentees already span high school interns, predocs, postdocs and medical fellows. His youngest trainees are so turned on to science and they are thriving. Nick makes science irresistible to his mentees because it is to him. His personal and professional mentoring of peers and postdocs has elevated their scientific contributions, their sense of personal well-being and in turn added to a very positive work environment. He is equally great at mentoring and enthusiastically conceiving and conducting science.

Nick loves to explain how things work to his mentees (and to me!) – for example, how the servers coordinate data processing between multiple CPU, how a quartz watch keeps time, and how computer keyboards convert mechanical information into electrical (he has refurbished many keyboards – e-wasted day is one of his favorites, he grabs the CPUs/motherboards, whatever could be used again). He solves problems for many projects because he enjoys it, and others appreciate his help. Nick is the go-to person in my lab for bouncing around ideas and navigating new technology. Nick is among the most capable and creative students I have mentored over 23 years. I do not say this lightly because I have had the privilege to mentor many UCSF students, each one of whom has talent, intelligence and drive."

Nominated by Joe Costello, Costello Laboratory / Department of Neurosurgery, University of California San Francisco, United States