Theodore Nelson is an Associate Lecturer at Weill Cornell Medicine. He completed a B.A. in Computer Science at Columbia University (2024) and is currently a Churchill Scholar completing an MPhil in Medical Science at Cambridge University.
He additionally serves as a bioinformatics specialist in Christopher E. Mason’s Lab, known for its contribution to the development of the MeRIP-seq technique and the application of the synthetic curlcake strands to epitranscriptomics validation. He leads the informatics and analysis of all current epitranscriptomic projects in the lab. He manages the lab’s collaborations for the Colossus Biosciences iPSC characterization project, the Columbia Mailman School of Public Health Environmental Epitranscriptomics project, and the National Institute of Technology Standards Genome in a Bottle project. His first author publications in Nature Communications and the International Journal of Molecular Sciences further the application of long-read sequencing, also known as third-generation sequencing, to astronaut health and cancer biology. He has served a reviewer for Nature Genetics.
He founded a high school biology lab program at Columbia University called Glass Half Full or Empty: Illuminating the Human Transcriptome, which gives underserved high school students the opportunity to perform wet-lab long-read sequencing research. He teaches a course at Weill Cornell Medicine, entitled Single-Molecule Sequencing: Methods, Training, and Applications, as a part of the Physiology, Biophysics & Systems Biology graduate program. His bioinformatics YouTube Channel (MakeTheBrainHappy – Scientific Exploration), has over 600 subscribers, 80,000 views, and 6,000 watch hours.
