Rate My Professor Nicole Tse

Associate Professor Nicole Tse serves in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Melbourne, where she holds the position of Associate Professor in the Robert Cripps Institute for Cultural Conservation, extending her contributions from the Grimwade Centre for Cultural Materials Conservation. Her academic and research career focuses on sustaining the cultural record and managing change across the Asia Pacific region. Tse examines conservation through the lenses of objects, people, place, and time, promoting inclusive, intercultural, and collection-focused strategies that apply the scientific method to create regionally relevant actions. This approach addresses challenge-led materials conservation in the global south, exemplified by her co-founding role in the Asia Pacific Tropical Climate Conservation Art Research Network (APTCCARN). She supervises PhD and minor thesis students and teaches in the university's undergraduate and master's programs in cultural materials conservation.

Tse has directed impactful projects such as the conservation and recovery of Chinese Australian collections at the See Yup Temple, community-involved rebuilding of Philippine church heritage following earthquakes, peeling back historical paint layers at Victoria's Trades Hall for redevelopment, and investigations into retablos and santos for Philippine heritage preservation. She has delivered keynote addresses, including 'Managing Museum Collections, Climate and Colour Change,' and contributed to strategies for collection care at the National Museum of the Philippines amid climate challenges. Her scholarly output includes the book 'Treasures of Philippine Art - The Basi Revolt by Esteban Villanueva' (2020), 'Degradation profiles of silk textiles in diverse environments' (2017), 'Preventive Conservation: People, Objects, Place and Time in the Philippines' (2018), 'Materiality, Making and Meaning: Building the Artist Record through Conservation in Indonesia' (2018), and 'A Preliminary Investigation into the Behavior of Modern Artists’ Oil Paints in a Hot and Humid Climate' (2019). Tse's influence is evident in her role advancing preventive conservation practices and adaptive intercultural methodologies. She received the AICCM Medal in 2024 and Conservator of the Year from the Australian Institute for the Conservation of Cultural Materials, and her institute's project earned the 2025 UNESCO Global Award for World Heritage Education.