Dr Nikola S. Nikolov is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Information Systems at the University of Limerick (UL) where he has been an academic faculty member since 2001. Dr Nikolov has served as a course director of multiple undergraduate and postgraduate programs at UL. Currently, he is the course director of the B.Sc. in Computer Systems at UL. He is a co-head of the Big Data and Analytics Research Group (BDARG); a member of the IEEE Technical Committee on Visual Analytics and Communication and the co-author of more than 70 peer-reviewed papers in network visualization, applied machine learning, and recommender systems.

Dr Nikolov has worked as a principal investigator on research projects funded by Science Foundation Ireland and the Irish Research Council, as well as a supervisor of PhD students funded by the China Scholarship Council, the Ministry of Education of Libya, and the government of Saudi Arabia. He has received multiple Erasmus+ mobility grants for collaboration with Laboratoire Systèmes Intelligents et Applications at University Sidi Mohamed Ben Abdellah in Morocco.