Floyd Nichols

Research Interest
My research interests include exploring biological signatures through the lens of organic geochemistry and astrobiology. More specifically, I use lipid biomarkers as a tool to evaluate the production and preservation potential of life in hypersaline environments that have similar chemistries to deposits on Mars such as Jezero and Gale Crater. Furthermore, hypersaline environments excel at capturing and preserving precipitation/evaporation signals; however, they are often neglected in climate models despite potentially having a large influence in carbon flux to the atmosphere. As such, I use a combination of lipid biomarkers, organic carbon, and stable isotopes to reconstruct paleohydroclimate in hypersaline systems to help inform present and future climate. Additionally, since hypersaline environments are very complex and often have non-linear patterns and relationships, an extension of my work focuses on leveraging machine learning on organic geochemical datasets to reveal patterns within complex data as well as provide agnostic insight into the influence of the signatures that we see. 

Research Areas
Organic Geochemistry
Astrobiology
Paleohydroclimate
Data Science and Machine Learning

Education
PhD, Northwestern University, 2024
BS, Biology, Saint Vincent College, 2019

Links
Research Site: sites.google.com/vt.edu/vtcoga
Google Scholar: scholar.google.com/citations?user=Kwx0rD0AAAAJ&hl=en&oi=ao
Interactive Machine Learning Software: vt-coga-ai2-astrobiology.hf.space