Nick is a corpus linguist, with a particular interest in developing and applying corpus-based approaches to questions, problems and issues in the fields of discourse analysis, genre analysis and phraseology. He has published widely in these fields, and has given conference presentations and invited talks at institutions in Belgium, China, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Jordan, Kazakhstan, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, South Korea, Spain, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, the United States and the UK. He is currently serving on the Editorial Boards of the international academic journals English Today and the Journal of English for Academic Purposes.

Nick is participating in the current project as an External Scientific Expert. As an internationally recognized authority in the field of academic discourse studies, he has particular expertise in applying corpus-based and computational methods to the analysis of both written and spoken academic genres, and a strong and demonstrable track record of working in multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary projects. While most of his previous research has focused on academic English, he has also been involved in several collaborative projects focusing on contrastive analyses with academic and professional genres in Chinese and Polish. He is delighted to have the opportunity to broaden this base still further by studying the rhetorical characteristics of academic writing in Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian.