Senior Electrical Engineer, Intelligent Automation Inc, Rockville MD 

Ms Nicholas received a BSEE from the Johns Hopkins University in 1984 and a M.S. degree in Digital Systems from Loyola College of Maryland in 1987.  

Ms Nicholas has over 20 years of experience as a design engineer with a focus on digital hardware.  She joined Intelligent Automation Inc. in May of 2007 as a Senior Electrical Engineer in the Sensing and Communications Group.   While working at IAI, she has developed a prototype Adapatable Wiring Manifold for AFRL’s Responsive Space Plug ‘n Play Satellite.  Additionally, she has contributed to other FPGA-based designs for various SBIR research applications.  The designs have included Microblaze processors, Rocket I/O and other Xilinx IP cores as well as custom VHDL code. 

Before joining Intelligent Automation Inc., Ms Nicholas was a senior design engineer at Spirent Communications located in Rockville MD. Over her career, she has designed hardware for commercial, NASA and military sponsored projects including satellite components, payloads, instrumentation for nuclear submarines, as well as telecommunications test equipment.  As a part of her hardware design experience, she has supported the necessary design verification testing such as thermal, shock, EMI/EMC, etc. to insure equipment reliability in harsh environments.