Professor Ann Nicholson
Russian, rugby, reading, chess, computers, cricket, clarinet, maths, science, piano, Gaelic football – Professor Ann Nicholson from Monash University’s Faculty of Information Technology...
Russian, rugby, reading, chess, computers, cricket, clarinet, maths, science, piano, Gaelic football – Professor Ann Nicholson from Monash University’s Faculty of Information Technology has been adding to her long list of eclectic interests since childhood.
A bright, keen student with a passion for reasoning and problem solving, she studied science at uni in the 1980s and fell for the burgeoning field of computing as soon as she discovered it. “I guess you’d say I fell in love with it,” she says. “It’s such an exciting area once you start learning to program and make the computer do what you want and solve problems that people just can’t do or that would just take forever.”
Keen to research artificial intelligence and travel internationally Professor Nicholson took up vacation jobs in rural Victoria before landing a Rhodes scholarship (in part due to her diverse interests and talents). Joining a world-leading robotics research group at the University of Oxford proved transformative. “It attracted the best people from all over the world,” she says. “So you get the advantage not only of working with these great experts but also interacting with a really wide range of interesting people – and not even just in your own discipline area.”
Two years at Brown University in the US followed her four years in the UK. In 1994, keen to return home, Professor Nicholson joined Monash as a lecturer in Computer Science and started building her now internationally renowned research into Bayesian networks. These are graphical computer models of systems operating under uncertainty, which allow experts in fields as diverse ecology, medicine and meteorology to reason their way through complex problems involving myriad variables. They can be used for anything from managing threatened species to determining the risk of fire in specific locations posed by ageing power poles. “I’d been doing the Bayesian network research from my PhD days so I was in that area in its early days and it really went from strength to strength,” Professor Nicholson says.
Throughout her stellar career Professor Nicholson has made time to pursue her many passions outside work. At one stage, she was coach of the Monash women’s cricket team and she also captained Victoria’s first women’s rugby team. In 2001 she started a family and began an eight-year stint as a part timer, which she says never hampered her progress thanks to Monash’s family-friendly approach. “I was still given opportunities while I worked part time,” she says. “But I also had to work pretty hard. I wrote a book with a colleague that really helped establish our international reputation with Bayesian networks.”
Professor Nicholson finds the long-term male dominance of the IT industry depressing but is heartened by the far better representation of women in her faculty, including in leadership positions. For young people with the intellectual rigour, technical expertise, lateral thinking and flair for communication required to excel at computer science, she says there’s never been a more exciting time to join a field that’s constantly diversifying. “It’s a fantastic area for anyone to be in,” Professor Nicholson says. “And, I’m generalising a bit I know, but women do tend to have better communication skills, are good at working in teams, and all those other skills that are needed along with the technical skills.”