Nicola is an early career research fellow in Health Economics. She gained her master's in Economic Evaluation for Healthcare Technology Assessment from the University of York in 2019 and completed her PhD in Management Science in 2023 as a JARA scholar with partial funding from the Scottish Government.

She is also an established consultant physician specialising in acute and internal medicine, with 25 years of experience delivering clinical care in the UK.

Her PhD explored the effectiveness of remote senior decision-making in urgent care resource allocation. This was an extensive mixed methods study that used ethnography to inform a hybrid computer simulation model (agent-based and discrete event simulation). The model served as a platform for evaluating national policy on early decision-making.

She maintains her interest in mixed methods research and the use of dynamic simulation modelling. Her current research interests are service design and delivery, rural population health, chronic health care, and the use of simulation modelling in evaluation.

Prior to working in the Yunus Centre, Nicola contributed to NHS Scotland’s Unscheduled Care Directorate as a working group participant, researcher, and co-author of National guidelines. She was part of an award-winning collaboration that developed real-time critical care resource need predictions during the COVID-19 pandemic. She has provided both unpaid and paid advisory services for public service bodies in the UK.