Dr Nick Schaum; Cambridge Stem Cell Institute
Nick is a Senior Research Associate in the laboratory of Walid Khaled, where he leads the Ageing Cluster of the National Mouse Genetics Network, building a spatially resolved multiomic atlas of mouse ageing. He is also co-founder of Covalent Bio, where he is developing infrastructure to transform the global corpus of biomedical data into a machine-readable semantic layer. As a graduate student in the laboratory of Tony Wyss-Coray at Stanford, he founded Tabula Muris Senis, the first organism-wide mouse ageing atlas at single-cell resolution.
Ageing is the dominant risk factor for the diseases that kill and disable most people, yet the molecular landscape of ageing remains poorly mapped. No single lab or institution can solve this alone — we need public-good infrastructure that the whole community can build on. The NMGN Ageing Cluster addresses this by generating a multiomic and phenotypic atlas across the mouse lifespan: two strains, four timepoints, longitudinal phenotyping, and spatial transcriptomics. But new data alone is insufficient — millions of relevant datasets already exist, scattered across public repositories in forms neither humans nor machines can readily use. Covalent.bio tackles this by building an AI-powered semantic layer over existing biological repositories, standardising metadata at global scale and making the existing corpus of data ML-ready. These represent two sides of the same strategy: producing the foundational data the field needs, while unlocking the vast wealth of data it already has.
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