Nicky Krause

Nicky Krause is a Dairyland, WI Brickyard Leader and social scientist whose research sits at the intersection of communication, trust, and political division. She earned her PhD in Mass Communication from the University of Wisconsin–Madison (minors in Quantitative Methods and Political Science) and her MA in Communication from the University of Illinois–Chicago (UIC). As a John Templeton Foundation Civic Science Fellow, she studied how communities holding very different values can engage with science and one another more productively — examining the roots of polarization and the conditions under which trust in science and public institutions is built or eroded.

More recently, Nicky has worked as an independent researcher and consultant. With the Science Communication Lab, she studies how films can help audiences build trust and connection with scientists; with Pueblo, a community engagement collaborative, she co-designs frameworks to help researchers and cultural institutions form more equitable, reciprocal relationships with the communities they work alongside. Blending research and practice this way has been a theme throughout her career: she has also spent years as a UX researcher, designer, and project manager, including work in the civic technology sector at 18F, where she helped redesign the Federal Election Commission’s website to make campaign finance information easier for everyday Americans to access and understand. What ties Nicky’s research and practice together is a conviction that trust and understanding are built through shared human experience, and must be earned rather than demanded.

That belief is what draws her to the Brickyard — and it’s an instinct she has acted on before. During her time at UIC, Nicky worked with The Freshwater Lab to help organize “Water after Borders,” a summit that brought water leaders from communities across the Great Lakes and the Middle East together around their shared dependence on a common resource. Now, after years spent studying why Americans grow distrustful and divided — and what it takes to bridge those gaps — she is eager to put the ideas into practice in her home state of Wisconsin, shoulder to shoulder with people she might never otherwise meet. Nicky comes to the Brickyard knowing there’s plenty she has yet to learn, just as eager to listen and be changed by the work as she is to contribute to it.