Dr Nichols is the Professor of Neuroimaging Statistics and a Wellcome Senior Research Fellow in Basic Biomedical Science. He is a statistician with a solitary focus on modelling and inference methods for brain imaging research. He has a unique background, with both industrial and academic experience, and diverse training including computer science, cognitive neuroscience and statistics.

The focus of Dr Nichols's work is developing modelling and inference methods for brain image data. He has worked with a variety of types of data, including Positron Emission Tomography and Magneto- and Electroencephalography, though most of his methods are motivated by Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) and functional MRI (fMRI) in particular. He has extensive experience in modelling large, complex data, particularly known for his contributions to multiple testing inference for brain imaging. He has developed methods for clinical trials with imaging, as well as methods for integrating genetic and imaging data. His current research involves meta-analysis of neuroimaging studies and informatics tools to make data sharing easy and pervasive.