Nicky Nicolson
Fellow at Software Sustainability Institute
London, England, United Kingdom
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolNicky Nicolson is a senior research leader and software developer turned biodiversity informatics expert with 14 years of experience building scalable, open-science tooling for natural history collections. Based at Kew, she leads teams that curate and expose global taxonomic, nomenclatural and specimen data, having designed graph-based “names backbone” architectures and modernised IPNI infrastructure. She combines rigorous software practices—version control, dependency management and CI—with domain knowledge in botany and a PhD in machine learning to enable reproducible, high-impact data mobilisation and analysis. Active in the standards and community space, she now serves as a Software Sustainability Institute Fellow and TDWG outreach chair, bridging technical development, publishing workflows and global initiatives like the World Flora effort.
14 years of coding experience
15 years of employment as a software developer
BSc (Hons), Botany, BSc (Hons), Botany at Royal Holloway, U. of LondonDoctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Machine learning, Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Machine learning at Brunel University LondonMSc, Computer Science, MSc, Computer Science at University of Kent
Github Skills (164)
biodiversity-informatics10
ecology10
data-wrangling10
wikidata10
stable10
java10
biodiversity10
openrefine10
reconciliation10
jekyll10
sankey-diagram9
python9
text-parser9
pelican9
journalism9
Programming languages (18)
Github contributions (5)
RBGKew/Reconciliation-and-Matching-Framework
Feb 2012 - Nov 2016
A framework to allow the matching of string entities using customised sets of transformations and matchers, plus a tool to produce the necessary configurations and another to expose them as OpenRefine reconciliation services.
Contributions:52 commits, 5 pushes, 3 comments in 4 years 9 months
openrefine
RBGKew/String-Transformers
Feb 2012 - Aug 2015
A collection of Java string transformers, suitable for use with OpenRefine. Some generic, some aimed at botany and taxonomy.
Contributions:19 commits, 9 pushes, 1 tag in 3 years 6 months
javaopenrefine
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