Dr Nikola S. Nikolov is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Computer Science and Information Systems where he has been an academic faculty member since 2001. Currently, Dr Nikolov also serves as the course director of the M.Sc. in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning 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 author of more than 70 research papers in network visualization, machine learning and recommender systems.

He 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.