Nicole founded and operates a successful outdoor gear company specializing in small-batch, handmade bike bags. She leads all aspects of business operations including market research, product development, supply chain management, and customer relations, while achieving consistent yearly sales growth. She has strategic partnerships both with local retailers and industry leaders like Club Ride Apparel, Oboz Footwear, and TREW Gear to enhance brand visibility and credibility within the outdoor community. Nicole also manages a team of contractors, coordinating the integration of various project components to deliver timely, high-quality final products

Nicole led the organization’s community programs focused on plant science education, engaging K-12 students through interactive lessons and hands-on activities. She created new and lasting partnerships with schools, local businesses, and community organizations. She effectively communicated organization’s mission and goals through email campaigns, events, and social media outreach, fostering community presence and supporting fundraising efforts.

Nicole led a seasonal field crew collecting ecological data pertaining to an ongoing study of plant-insect interactions across an elevational gradient in the Teton Mountain Range. She developed and implemented a comprehensive sampling schedule, ensuring alignment with research goals and attaining optimal sampling of species at the correct phenological stages to maximize data quality and crew productivity. Following data collection, Nicole also completed data quality control and data entry tasks. She also took initiative to complete an independent research project producing summary statistics for the collected data, utilizing R and culminating in a poster presentation at the 2022 Entomology Society of America Annual Conference

Nicole led a crew on multi-day field hitches collecting ecological monitoring data in rangelend sites across Idaho. She used geospatial tools - Survey123, Collector, FieldMaps - to perform high quality data collection in accordance with standardized monitoring protocols set by the Bureau of Land Management. Protocols included site assessments, plant identification, soil characterization, and vegetation mapping. As the crew leader, Nicole was also responsible for managing sampling schedules and conducting quality control assessments prior to data submission. This position required a high level of independence, creative problem-solving, and team leadership, often while out of service in remote field sites for up to a week at a time.

As part of the NEON project at the Yellowstone Sites (Northern Rocke Domain, Nicole carried out a variety of standardidzed ecological data collection protocols. As the leader of the plant diversity efforts, she was required to identfiy plant species, coordinate and collaborate with visiting botanists, and perform herbarium work to document common species. This position also entailed other standardized collection protocols like beetle collection, mosquito trapping, vegetation mapping and measuring, coarse down wood assessments, tick sampling, and small mammal trapping. Included work in both wet lab and dry lab.

Nicole conducted undergraduate research where she 1) led her own spatial forest ecology project, and 2) assisted with a graduate research project on tree regeneration. Her work primarilty involved maintaining experimental plots and monitoring saplings in both experimental and natural settings. She also mapped and tagged trees and saplings and conducted site assessments. Nicole turned her research on the spatial arrangement of trees and saplings into an undergradaute thesis, exploring whether the spatial patterns in the Rocky Mountains aligned with the Janzen-Connell hypothesis observed in tropical forests. Her undergraduate thesis research was accepted and she graduated with Honors Distinction in Biological Sciences.

Nicole conducted research for independent study project for partial completion for SIT Comparative Ecology and Conservation (Ecuador) program. She compared the abundance and diversity of moth species at different sites in a cloud forest ecosystem.