Nicholas James Patterson (born 9 June 1947)^[1] is a mathematician working as a staff scientist at the Broad Institute with notable contributions to the area of computational genomics.^[2][3] His work has appeared in scientific journals such as Nature, Science and Nature Genetics.^[4][5] His research has brought a better understanding of early human migrations.^[6][7] He is among the group of scientists who have sequenced the Neanderthal genome in 2010.^[8] This was followed by the sequencing of a much higher quality Neanderthal genome, where the subject was from the Altai Mountains, in 2014.^[9] These studies have uncovered some unexpected facts about the interbreeding between archaic and modern humans.

Patterson was an only child who grew up in the Bayswater section of central London.^[10] Patterson received his B.A. and Ph.D. in mathematics at Cambridge University.^[3] His doctoral advisor was John G. Thompson.^[11] He initially worked for the British code-breaking agency GCHQ and the Center for Communications Research in Princeton.^[12]

Following this cryptology work, Patterson worked at the quantitative trading firm Renaissance Technologies.^[13]

In 2001, Patterson joined the Center for Genome Research at MIT, the Whitehead Institute. He briefly worked on gene expression data applied to cancer before switching to the study of human genetics.^[3]

In 2012, Patterson developed ADMIXTOOLS, a software package written in C that is currently widely used by population geneticists.^[14]