Nilsen Strandskov

 

Email & Web Developer, Wanderer, Science Enthusiast

 

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About

Web Development

My experience with web design began back in 2008 when one aspect of my work at the Department of Marine and Coastal Sciences was maintaining a WordPress blog on what I was working on. This continued throughout my studies until the year 2012 came to a close when I made a pretty drastic career move, stepping away from being a researcher in the field of oceanography to begin my pursuit of becoming a web developer. A position had recently opened up in the lab I had assisted in, maintaining and updating their Joomla! site. In the coming months I would gradually expand my roll to maintaining over 20 sites related to the Rutgers University Department of Marine and Coastal Sciences (formerly Institute of Marine and Coastal Sciences) and the Mid-Atlantic Regional Association Coastal Ocean Observing System (all built on either Joomla!, WordPress, Drupal, or HTML/CSS/JS without a CMS).

In December 2016, I took a job with the education firm Achieve3000 as a lead web developer for the marketing department where my focus has been the design, production and optimization of marketing emails and landing pages on the Salesforce Pardot Platform. This process includes providing input in the design process, building out the designs with html/css/javascript, and QA’ing the collateral across multiple devices, platforms, browsers and with the Litmus platform. I also managed updates for our corporate website, microsites and landing pages.

After a short stint filling in as a Contract Email Developer at Travelers Insurance, in the fall of 2018 I landed a job at New Avon llc where I gained experience using the B2C marketing platforms Cheetah and Salesforce Marketing Cloud.  I also had the opportunity to work with more advanced dynamic content and segmentation filters as we provided the customer list of over 2 million subscribers email communications with a more personalized touch based on shopping trends. 

Science

In the fall of 2008, I began assisting in the Coastal Ocean Observation Lab (RUCOOL). Through my experiences in this position and as a mentor in the Ocean Observatories course taught by Drs. Glenn, Schofield and Kohut, I was given the opportunity to work on a variety of projects ranging from ocean-atmosphere interaction in the North Atlantic, to dynamics of the polar oceans, and to being part of the first team to pilot a robot across an ocean basin. I was also selected to be a representative of RUCOOL on trips to Svalbard, Norway and San Luis Obispo, CA as part of the NORUS Program; to Baiona Spain for the conclusion of the robot RU27 crossing the Atlantic; to Washington D.C. on a number of occassions pertaining to public outreach for RU27; and to London and Plymouth, England as part of the Challenger Glider Mission. Through summer internships I also gaimed experience working with the HF-Radar network, satellite remote sensing data, and Argo Drifter data along with data visualization techniques using MATLAB.

Since graduating with a degree in Biological Oceanography in 2012, I have continued working in the lab as pilot of the Challenger Glider Mission. The goal of this project is to take a fleet of 16 Autonomous Under Water Vehicles and circumnavigate the world’s ocean while both collecting data to aid in climate research and educating the public. As part of this position, I have spent time in the Canary Islands working with the University of Las Palmas Gran Canaria and PLOCAN, and have been to the United Kingdom to promote the project at Oceanology 2014 and the Challenger Society 2014 Conference.

To see some of the work I’ve been involved in, you can check out the mission blog I contributed to here and my Google Scholar page.