Nova Ember Patch is a principal engineer at Shutterstock, specializing in internationalization, multilingual search, and building products that support the world’s languages, writing systems, and cultures. They are an open source developer, contributor to the Unicode CLDR, and member of the Unicode Consortium. Speaking experience includes the Internationalization & Unicode Conference, Open Source Bridge, AWS Loft, and OSCON.

Nova is an amateur lichenologist, focusing on the urban lichens of New York City, and runs the website and open data project Lichens.nyc and the Lichens of New York City project on iNaturalist. They hold a botany certificate from the New York Botanical Garden and are an active member of the New York Mycological Society. Past lichen talks and walks have been given to the Clark Rogerson Foray, New York Mycological Society, Connecticut–Westchester Mycological Association, and Boston Skillshare.

Nova uses the gender-neutral pronoun they to refer to themself, as opposed to gendered pronouns like she or he, and prefers not to use honorifics, especially not gendered ones like Ms. or Mr.