Communications Director

Shannon Nickinson joined IHMC as communications director in January 2022. Her role is to share the stories of IHMC’s researchers and their work through print and digital platforms and storytelling tools. She is the author of the IHMC newsletter, a contributor to the STEM-Talk podcast, serves as the media contact for IHMC, and manages internal communication efforts. She also works to support IHMC’s research, educational, and philanthropic outreach efforts, including Science Saturdays, Summer Robotics Camp, Robotics Open House and more.

She is a Pittsburgh-area native and a 1994 graduate of Northwestern University. She spent 20 years in daily journalism, working for Gannett-owned newspapers in West Virginia and Pensacola, Fla. She won numerous individual and team reporting and writing awards in her journalism career and was part of a team at the Pensacola News Journal that was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. As an assignment and content editor, she helped guide her staff through the changing media landscape through the 2000s. Her daily journalism career concluded with a 14-month stint as a local news columnist, writing five days a week, and earning an award from the parent company, Gannett.

In September of 2013, as the first employee of Studer Community Institute, she edited and wrote for news website PensacolaToday.com, launched the television show “Progress+Promise,” and was the lead editor and writer for the Institute’s Pensacola Metro Report, as well as the follow up education reports the Institute published. At SCI she lead a team that built a constructive, objective news forum, using media platforms to communicate with and engage readers — web-based platforms Pensacola Today and Progress and Promise, a local access television show, as well as social media platforms. She was creator of the SCI Community Dashboard, a data-based snapshot that tracked the economic, educational, and social well-being of the community.

Her skills in project management, deadline and long-range content creation, community connections, and writing were used to pivot SCI in 2016 to create research-based outreach, programs, and advocacy as the Director of Early Learning. She created, refined, and managed SCI’s early learning outreach projects, including the Brain Bag project, SCI’s partnership with the University of Chicago’s TMW Center for Early Learning and Public Health, and the parent outreach collaborations with LENA Research Group, The Basics Learning Network and others. She oversaw the implementation of tools that, through 2021 reached more 18,000 families directly through in-hospital education, in-school partnerships, and collaborative efforts with community-based nonprofit partners. She was SCI’s development director, lead grant writer and content developer for SCI’s public awareness efforts.

She is the mother of two daughters; wife to a Pensacola native son whose career has included daily journalism, technology journalism, online publishing, videography and photography; and walker of adorable shelter dog, Max, who adopted her family 10 years ago.