Student Spotlight: Nick Chin

A native of Tampa, Nick received his BS in Environmental Engineering Sciences from UF in 2017. After graduating, Nick worked as a Civil/Environmental Engineer and has experience with site characterization and remediation, as well as establishing minimum flow levels for river systems in Florida. Wanting to learn more about technology and machine learning techniques, Nick received his MS in Business Analytics and Information Systems from the University of South Florida in 2020.

Recently, Nick was awarded the prestigious UF Graduate School Preeminence Fellowship to help support his PhD work, which will focus on modeling coastal watersheds using both mechanistic and Artificial Intelligence (AI) methods. An avid saltwater fisherman, Nick is excited to put his data analysis and machine learning skills to work protecting Florida’s coastal ecosystems.

“As I gained more experience from engineering jobs and my Master’s program, I became increasingly interested in wanting to leverage technology to study and help make novel insights about the physical sciences. There is so much interesting and untouched hydrologic and environmental data that has the potential to be transformed into solutions to large scale problems we face including climate change, harmful algae blooms, and agricultural water management. I’m really excited to be working with an amazing group of people and to have the chance to immerse myself in the intersection between machine learning and physical modeling.”