Nick Semenkovich, MD PhD

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I'm an Assistant Professor at the Medical College of Wisconsin (MCW) and founding member of MCW's new Data Science Institute. As physician-scientist, I study liquid biopsies (including cell-free DNA) and their applications as biomarkers in a range of rare and understudied diseases (including sepsis). I am also an attending physician (seeing both inpatients and outpatients) and I have a passion for information security as it applies to healthcare and medical devices.

Previously, I was a research-track instructor and attending physician at Washington University, within the Division of Oncology, and member of the Siteman Cancer Center. I completed my postdoctoral studies with Dr. Aadel Chaudhuri and my fellowship in Endocrinology, Metabolism, and Lipid Research at WashU, through the Physician Scientist Traning Program. Prior to fellowship, I was an Internal Medicine resident at the Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston. I did my MD/PhD at WashU (as part of the NIH Medical Scientist Training Program), where I was advised by Dr. Jeff I. Gordon and funded by the NHGRI. My PhD thesis in genetics explored the impact of the gut microbiota on host epigenetic signaling, as assayed by ATAC-seq.

I graduated from MIT with degrees in Course 6 (Computer Science) and Course 7 (Biology), and briefly spent time at Google working on a framework to manage extremely large scientific datasets. At MIT, I also served as Editor in Chief of the student newspaper The Tech.

In information security, I'm currently developing a public ranking system for the security of healthcare systems (similar to the US News rankings), and previously wrote much of the modern Chrome version of the EFF's HTTPS Everywhere extension.

If you're bored, you can follow my main-belt asteroid — which looks like it's having a great time just a bit past Mars — or check the status of this legislation I helped draft that would require healthcare workers to receive yearly influenza vaccinations (long before the pandemic made that cool).