Mark Nelms

Mark Nelms is a cheminformatician in the Bioinformatics and Computational Biology Program at RTI. He has over 10 years’ experience processing, analyzing, and modelling a variety of biological and chemical data. His current research is focused on integrating data from new approach methods with mechanistic understanding of biological perturbations to help evaluate chemical compounds. Dr. Nelms is currently involved in several projects aimed at using the adverse outcome pathway (AOP) framework and various cheminformatic and computational toxicology approaches to help prioritize chemicals for screening and assist in guiding in vitro assay testing. He is also a working group supervisor of the Consensus Measures for Phenotypes and Exposures (PhenX) project, which aims to identify standard sets of measurement protocols that can be used when conducting biomedical research.

Dr. Nelms received his Bachelor of Science in biological science from Lancaster University and his doctorate in predictive toxicology from Liverpool John Moores University. Prior to joining RTI in 2020, Dr. Nelms was an Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education (ORISE) Postdoctoral Fellow at the EPA. In this role, he used computational methods to combine different biological, physicochemical, and chemical structure data to identify Threshold of Toxicological Concern (TTC) values for environmentally relevant chemicals, as well as to highlight how mechanistic information held within AOPs could be used to support the assessment of chemical mixtures.