Writer & Communications Director

Shannon Nickinson joined IHMC as writer/communications director in January 2022. She will help share the stories of IHMC’s researchers and their work through print and digital platforms and storytelling tools.

Through 2021, she was the director of early brain development for Studer Community Institute, building the footprint of the nonprofit’s work in that area in the community.

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.

In September of 2013, as the first employee of SCI, 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.

She managed all of the Institute’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 was the institute’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 who is a technology journalist; and walker of a shelter dog, Max, who adopted her family nine years ago.