is a human, mother, partner, and friend who is preoccupied with the possible and works like hell to bring its most beautiful bits into being. She’s a shapeshifter who has, over the course of her career, taken form as an educator, pracademic, ethicist, attorney, administrator, mentor, author, advocate, and consultant. Often, though not always, she’s focused her work on shaping change in and through the food system. Nicole’s efforts propelled multi-year projects to drastically reduce food waste, revitalize regional food systems, seek justice for agricultural and food workers, explore ethical dilemmas across the food chain, and develop systems-aware, equity-enhancing laws and policies.

Nicole’s work is grounded in ecological knowledge, influenced by systems thinking, attentive to relationships of care and reciprocity, and aimed at collective liberation. Through this work, she produces guidance, actionable policy, program, and enterprise recommendations, and truth-telling tools that enable moves toward relationship. She has been nationally recognized for her work on food waste and conservation, harnessing the power of food systems to address the climate crisis, and farmworker justice. Yet Nicole is most proud of the rising generation of eco-social change-shapers that she has had the privilege of supporting as an educator and supervisor.

A commitment to informed, change-oriented, interdisciplinary interrogation of the practices, policies, preferences, and values that shape food systems propels Nicole's research. Within the sphere of agri-food studies, many experts urge examination of the food system from farm-to-fork. Nicole has always preferred to think about the food system from ecosystem-through-farm-to-community. Even more conceptually, she imagines a path guided by ethics that leads to relationship.

Nicole is also the co-author of a new book: Feeding Each Other: Shaping Change in the Food System Through Relationship.

In recent years, Nicole has served as Sterling College’s Vice President for Strategic Initiatives and the director of its EcoGather initiative and School of the New American Farmstead, as well as faculty and research scholar at the University of Colorado Boulder, the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics, the University of Arkansas School of Law, and Sterling. Nicole is also a founding co-convener and policy director for Project Protect Food Systems Workers. An integrative lawyer, Nicole is also of counsel to Handel Food Law, LLC.