GÉANT (United Kingdom)

Nicole Harris

Nicole Harris joined GÉANT in March 2013 as a Project Development Officer to support the global GÉANT Community Programme. She works primarily in the security and middleware areas and specialises in managing global IT initiatives, policy and legal issues and open source developments.

Since 2010, Nicole has been involved in REFEDS (Research and Education Federations) as joint coordinator with Licia Florio and continues that role as part of her GÉANT responsibilities. REFEDS is the voice that articulates the mutual needs of research and education identity federations worldwide, and provides a range of working groups, advisories and services to enhance interaction and interoperability between identity federations.

Nicole is responsible for TF-CSIRT, GÉANT's forum for CSIRTS, and works to support GÉANT's successful TRANSITS training programme as well as managing a variety of security related projects for National and Research Education Networks (NRENs). More recently, Nicole has set up the GÉANT "Greenhouse" initiative to support sustainable models for open source software projects.

Prior to joining GÉANT, Nicole worked at JISC for 10 years, supporting a range of programmes and services in the middleware, research and open source spaces. Whilst at Jisc, Nicole established the UK Access Management Federation, one of the earliest research and education identity federations to emerge.

Nicole holds a Master of Arts degree in Children's Literature, which has been more useful in her technical career than people might think.