Rate My Professor Jacqui Nielsen

Dr Jacqui Nielsen serves as Teaching Fellow in the Higher Education Development Centre (HEDC) at the University of Otago, where she provides teaching and learning support to staff and students, coordinates and develops postgraduate programmes, and collaborates with academic departments on curriculum mapping. This includes aligning programme and course learning objectives with university strategic frameworks such as those for Māori, Pacific, sustainability, and Vision 2040. She also holds the position of Research Advisor for Health Sciences in the Research and Enterprise office, supporting departments including Anatomy and Physiology from Room 146 in the Lindo Ferguson Building. With a diverse teaching background spanning primary, secondary, and tertiary institutions in New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States, Nielsen draws on qualifications in both sciences and humanities. Her academic credentials include a BSc, LTCL, DipTchg (Secondary), first-class MSc, and PhD awarded by the University of Otago in 2013 for her thesis titled 'Aboveground-belowground Ecological Linkages in Exotic Thymus vulgaris L. in Central Otago, New Zealand'.

Nielsen's research interests encompass benchmarking best practices in doctoral supervision, enhancing online dexterity for students and teaching staff, addressing challenges of the Delphi Technique in medical education, and integrating Mātauranga Māori and Pacific research perspectives with sustainability in tertiary education. She has contributed to the Otago doctoral supervision programme through workshops on policies for including publications in theses. Her scholarly output includes peer-reviewed papers on invasion ecology, such as 'Home and away: biogeographic comparison of species diversity in Thymus vulgaris communities' (2017), 'An allelopathic plant facilitates species richness in the Mediterranean garrigue', and 'Thyme and space invasion: Thymus vulgaris decreases exotic plant species diversity in Central Otago, New Zealand', co-authored with Eva Grøndahl, Ragan M. Callaway, and Bodil Ehlers. These works, along with others on Thymus vulgaris adaptation and impacts, have collectively garnered 139 citations on Google Scholar.