Sam Angelli-Nichols

Sam Angelli-Nichols is a very smart person with “very bad ADHD.”

He got by in high school through intensely focused in-class study and no homework. That system didn’t work when he came to UMass Lowell (UML) in fall 2019 as a physics major, he says.

He flunked Calculus I. Then, on academic probation in his second semester, the campus shut down due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Angelli-Nichols fell apart academically – and he decided to take a leave of absence.

He sought treatment for Attention-deficit / hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) for the first time. Even more helpful, he says, was the gardening job he found: His boss was an older woman who had also struggled with severe ADHD and developed strong organizational skills to cope.

“It was time to reassess,” says Angelli-Nichols, who is from Hamilton, Massachusetts. “There’s nothing to talk about when you’re gardening except life, so I would talk and reflect.”

He reached two important conclusions. One, he was fine with gardening for the present, but not long-term, so he needed to go back to college. Two, he wanted to major in philosophy.

When he returned to UMass Lowell in fall 2022, he took Introduction to Philosophy with Assistant Professor Alison McConwell, who specializes in philosophy of science. Angelli-Nichols hadn’t even known there was such a field before meeting her, and he quickly decided to pursue philosophy of science by adding a minor in biology.

McConwell also gave Angelli-Nichols a job doing archival work, and then recommended him to Philosophy Department Chair Nicholas Evans, who hired him to assist in a review of research on studies involving performance-enhancing practices and substances. Such studies involve major ethical concerns.

“The two people who have changed my life the most at UML are Alison McConwell and Nick Evans,” Angelli-Nichols says now.

As a junior, Angelli-Nichols worked for a semester as a paid research assistant in the lab of Biology Assistant Professor Nicolai Konow, an evolutionary biologist. He cared for rats and filmed and analyzed their jaw movements as they ate. It dramatically changed his ideas about the challenges and ethics of using animals in scientific research, he says.

“It’s very easy to imagine the scientists as disengaged from the animals, but they were all animal lovers,” he says.

He also kept working with Evans on a new project: analyzing reports about research on COVID-19 that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security relied upon to make policy during the early stages of the pandemic. He used artificial intelligence to compare those reports to the final peer-reviewed and published papers to see if the changes were substantial enough to cause problems with government policy.

That research gave Angelli-Nichols experience in natural language processing, AI implementation and digital humanities. Soon, he will learn even more, as he wraps up his senior year and goes to work full time for Evans on a brand-new $2.7 million grant from the U.S. Army Research Office.

Working with a postdoctoral researcher from the University of Washington, Angelli-Nichols will train an artificial intelligence system to code and compare more than 40,000 social science research papers on the future effects of AI, so Evans’ team can analyze which research policymakers relied upon and why.

For the next two-plus years, while Angelli-Nichols works for Evans, he will apply to Ph.D. programs in philosophy of science. He hopes to become a professor.

“This is what I want,” he says.