analytics summit 2026

Bill James has been writing about baseball since 1975.  His annual Baseball Abstracts began in 1977 as self-published efforts selling 75 copies, and grew to be nationally published annual best sellers by the early 1980s, inspiring dozens of competitive efforts.  His annual Bill James Baseball Handbooks, which began in 1989, became a standard baseball reference, and were published for more than 30 years.  He worked for the Boston Red Sox from 2002 to 2019, celebrating five World Championships with them.  In 2006 he was named by Time Magazine as one of the 100 most influential people in the world, and the 2011 movie Moneyball explained his significance within baseball.

Kait Jackson is a biomechanics and sports performance specialist focused on understanding how elite athletes move and why those movements succeed under real competitive constraints. Her work sits at the intersection of advanced motion capture, applied biomechanics, and performance analytics, translating complex data into decisions that matter on the field, court, and arena.

Kait leads the development of biomechanical analysis pipelines used to evaluate movement efficiency, technical skill execution, and injury risk across a wide range of sports. She applies a multi-factor approach that integrates kinematics, kinetics, and task constraints to assess performance not as isolated variables, but as coordinated systems. Her work supports both individual athlete optimization and broader team-level performance frameworks.

With experience spanning professional, collegiate, and research settings, Kait collaborates closely with athletes, coaches, and performance staff to turn biomechanical insight into practical intervention. Her research and applied projects emphasize foundational movement quality, sport-specific skill demands, and the variability inherent in elite performance.

Known for bridging the gap between data, biomechanics, and real-world application, Kait brings a results-driven perspective to the evolving role of technology in high-performance sport. Her work challenges oversimplified metrics, emphasizing context, variability, and decision-making in elite movement.

Kristen Nicholson, PhD, joined the Wake Forest pitching lab, a joint venture between Atrium Health Wake Forest Baptist and Wake Forest University Athletics, in October 2018 as the director of the lab and lead of biomechanics research. She earned her undergraduate in Mathematical Science from Clemson University in 2010 and her MS and PhD in Biomechanics and Movement Science from the University of Delaware in 2015. Dr. Nicholson is currently an Associate Professor in Orthopaedic Surgery at Wake Forest University School of Medicine in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Dr. Nicholson has a particular interest in the development of non-invasive tools and methods for assessing kinematics and implementing scapular kinematics in baseball pitching. Her primary focus in the pitching lab has been optimizing pitching performance while reducing injury risk and using motion capture and biomechanics as a player development tool.