William Nickols

William Nickols is the co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of Lotas, a San Francisco-based artificial intelligence startup backed by Y Combinator. Founded in 2025 alongside Jorge Guerra, the two-person company develops AI-native integrated development environments for data scientists, starting with Rao, an AI coding assistant designed for RStudio's potential user base of up to 5 million professionals. Prior to launching Lotas, Nickols pursued a biostatistics doctorate at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and earned a concurrent master's degree in statistics from Harvard University. During his academic tenure, he maintained 23 GitHub repositories and shared the Harvard Department of Statistics Master's Prize in May 2024 for his top performance. His current focus centers on leveraging his expertise in R programming and statistical analysis to build specialized AI tools that accelerate complex data science workflows.