DOD SECRET (CNWDI, WNINTEL)
Dr. Nelson has pursued a professional career in applied research and development in the private sector. His research efforts have been expanded into new multimillion dollar business areas by his past employers: SAIC and Litton Data Systems. Dr. Nelson has spent much of his career rescuing troubled projects through the application of his unique scientific, engineering, and management skills. He has a talent for making optimal use of limited available resources and creating what is needed if it does not yet exist. He has earned a well deserved reputation as as a "technology fire jumper".
Dr. Nelson is a formally trained astrophysicist with an extensive background in computer systems and their applications. His experience base encompasses both hardware and software, including data acquisition, control systems, advanced signal processing, and artificial intelligence. His formal background and experience in both the physical sciences and computer science allow him to uniquely combine these two diverse, but interrelated, fields.
His formal education has enabled him to successfully capitalize on his ability to cull information across multiple disciplines and apply that knowledge to address and solve complex problems. Dr. Nelson excels at handling difficult projects in all aspects including technical, managerial, and financial.
Dr. Nelson has been intimately involved in a wide range of projects that span multiple disciplines:
August 2003 to Present - Teacher
The Harker School is a private, nonprofit, college preparatory school that offers an outstanding K-12 educational experience. I serve as a high school physics teacher and as the faculty supervisor for Harker Robotics. Developed labs and course materials for AP Physics C. Developed curriculum, labs and course materials for Modern Physics and Astronomy.
1995 to May Present - CTO and Member of the Board
Valiant Technologies is a self-funded product and services start-up. Our first product is RayCrete: The Original MultiMender. I serve as a Corporate VP, Chief Technology Officer, and member of the board to provide oversight on all company activities, technical expertise, and guidance for the growth of the corporation.
November 2000 to May 2001 - Sr. Member Technical Staff
Kestrel Solutions was an optical network start-up developing an integrated optical frequency-division-multiplexor (FDM). The Talon1000 is a 10 Gigabits per second (Gbps) point to point product that cost-effectively increases the capacity of existing and maximizes the capacity of future fiber networks. The Talon1000 enables metropolitan telecommunications service providers to send up to 10 Gbps of bandwidth over a single fiber pair at approximately one-half the projected cost of alternative technologies.
Initiated business engineering practices to improve efficiency and reduce costs. Reduced engineering capital budget by $500,000 (approximately half the original budget) by analyzing engineering needs and mapping them into the functional capabilities of the requested test equipment and accounting for the existing corporate asset base and functional needs across the company. Initiated and developed semi-automated tracking system for optimizing the use of limited engineering development resources. The system allows for better prototype asset requirements planning and management. Projected savings is on the order of $1 million in equipment that did not have to be purchased because of the ability make more optimal use of the existing asset base.
July 2000 to Present - Contractor
Dr. Nelson is working for the Tools Development Group to develop a methodology to improve their hiring process in order to meet their aggressive staffing goals for the quarter. Responsible for screening and interviewing all candidates for all positions prior to any interaction with the hiring managers.
February 1999 to July 2000 - Senior Program Manager/Director of Integration Test
Dr. Nelson was the Senior Program Manager and Director of Integration Test for MAYAN Networks. His responsibility was the creation and management of the project management team that oversaw all development efforts within the corporation as well as the creation of the integration test team and defining the role for that part of the organization. Dr. Nelson brought highly predicable planning to MAYAN Networks and was instrumental in the successful fielding of the Alpha and Beta versions of the MAYAN Unifier. Dr. Nelson brought order to the laboratory environment and developed controls that resulted in a successful working environment for the integration test team, the software development teams and the hardware development teams. MAYAN Networks was start-up that is developing an optical network edge device that will be capable of aggregating T1, T3, ATM, OC-3, OC-12, HDSL, as well as performing DS0 grooming and T1/T3 multiplexing (M13). Their technology also supports IP routing (RIP, OSPF, etc) and layer 2 protocols such as Frame Relay.
Dr. Nelson was a Senior Scientist with SAIC when SAI Technology (SAIT), the division of SAIC for which he worked, was acquired by Litton Data Systems.
July 1997 to February 1999 - Software Systems Engineering Section Manager, Sr. Technical Staff
In addition to being the acting project manager for EMS-2, Dr. Nelson oversaw all software systems design efforts, lead in identifying and defining future development approaches, including the use of languages, operating systems, and tools. Dr. Nelson also managing the information technology (IT) support of the department network and computer systems, managed the company web design and development group, and was the team leader for the Litton Data Systems San Diego BaaN ERP/PDM implementation.
November 1997 to May 1998 - M3(B) Principle Engineer
In addition to his duties as the EMS-2 Project Manager and the Software Systems Engineering Section Manager, Dr. Nelson was the principle engineer for the Mobile Medical Monitor project (a $1.2 million contract). This contract reflects Litton’s expansion on Dr. Nelson’s research and development efforts while he was with SAIC and are described in the next section. The M3 was featured on the CNN Future Watch television program.
Dr. Nelson conceived of the M3 system while at SAIC. He designed and personally constructed the prototype systems. He secured the necessary medical components through vendor OEM agreements and integrated them into multiple hardware and software testbeds. He used these early prototypes as marketing tools for customer presentations to help secure additional funding in cooperation with Business Development. The successful implementations were used as the basis for the formal designs that were later created by the engineering staff that in turn became the production level items. Dr. Nelson oversaw all elements of these formal design and implementation efforts.
March 1997 to November 1997
Dr. Nelson was transferred to Litton Data Systems as part of the sale of SAI Technology (SAIT) and was employed as a Senior Engineering Specialist. He was the project manager for the interactive electronic technical manual (IETM) EMS-2 project. The objective of the program, which was budgeted at slightly over $2 million, was to build a full SGML publishing system for a class 4 ITEM. Dr. Nelson was assigned the project, the success of which significantly impacted the future of the electronic maintenance systems business area, because it was going to default. The project delivered in September.
December 1984 to March 1997
Dr. Nelson spearheaded a number of applied research and development programs while at SAIC. His last with SAIC was the Mobile Medical Monitor (M3). Dr. Nelson took designs he had developed over the previous five years for the integration of medical monitoring devices into an open architecture system for field and telemedicine support in mass casualty situations. He turned them into the M3 in an 18-month time frame with a budget of less that $200,000. The M3 received FDA 510K approval as a medical device in March of 1997. As of 1997, SAIC has received $1.5 million, and Litton Data Systems $0.5 million, as a direct result of this work.
As an extension of the M3 work, Dr. Nelson was associated with the ARPA sponsored Trauma Care Information Management System (TCIMS) project. Dr. Nelson took the M3 design concepts and equipment and was restructuring them toward better support for remote field telemedicine and data visualization. The goal was to develop a wireless monitoring module, about the size of a CD ROM, with most of the acquisition functionality of the current M3 unit. This module would be attached to patients and the vital sign information would be transmitted back to the M3 unit wirelessly. This structure would allow multiple patients to be monitored by a single computer and would eliminate the external sensor wires.
(1993-1996) Dr. Nelson was the principle investigator on the ARPA sponsored research and development effort in the creation of advanced data compression techniques within the mobile communications environment (known internally as "Popham"). The project efforts resulted in the development of data compression capabilities that are from one to three orders of magnitude beyond the current state of the art. These advanced compression methodologies will be required to support the data rich environment of the mobile user.
Additional projects funded by SAIC include the ADCoS data acquisition software system and the associated communications modules for creating a low-cost wide-area distributed "on-hook" data logging network. ADCoS is written in C for the Windows environment and is designed as a rapid prototyping environment. It includes a complete programming API and external DDE hooks for interfacing all functionality into third party applications. SAIC also supported the investigation of the bifurcated-network-structure neural network/expert system hybrid for the field characterization of gas chromatography traces of petrochemical ground contamination. SAIC also funded the initial investigations, development, and pre-field trials into the use of the Scargle periodogram digital signal processing (DSP) technology for use in detecting people trapped in collapsed structures. The trapped person location (TPL) project was performed in cooperation with ELPAM electronics of Israel and required identifying low-level periodic signals with signal-to-noise-ratios less than 0.1.
As an extension to his research efforts at SAIC Dr. Nelson taught introductory and advanced undergraduate astronomy on a part time basis at the University of New Mexico (UNM). He also maintained an active research dialog with the Institute for Astrophysics at UNM. He worked with the Institute on the periodicity analysis of galactic center gamma ray data. He kept an active dialog with the Department of Psychology in the areas of human reaction time studies and cognitive science.
Dr. Nelson was the technical director on the aforementioned ARPA sponsored Popham project. When he took on the program it was 2 years behind schedule. The program was successfully completed on time and within budget.
Dr. Nelson has been tasked as the technical manager on several projects within SAIC. The Windows 2.0 based hypertext retrieval system for the Civil Engineering Division at Sandia Laboratories in Albuquerque New Mexico involved the coordination of the development team within SAIC and the data base information structuring team at the lab. The modifications to the strategic nuclear simulation PIN code for the Air Force CRAY 1 and CRAY 2 computers involved the coordination of the SAIC development effort, the Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC) development effort, and the managing of special access to the CRAY computers for use in classified operations mode. Dr. Nelson has also been the technical manager, as well as having provided scientific support, for a variety of sub-projects for the Defense Nuclear Agency (DNA) underground nuclear test series.
While working for SAIC in the Albuquerque area, Dr. Nelson was in charge of the computer security measures for his division.
(1994-1997) Dr. Nelson conceived, designed, and developed the Mobile Medical Monitor, or M3. The M3 is a field portable medical monitoring unit with support for blood pressure, pulse oximetry, cardiological data, video, and operator annotations. This station is based on the SAIC V2A2 LC ruggedized computer system. By acquiring physiological data in this open architecture environment, he extend the range of traditional monitoring by allowing Internet and intranet network access, long term data archiving, intelligent processing, and sensor-fusion. The software was a combination of LabVIEW, C, and C++. The main application contains over 200 virtual instruments (VIs).
Dr. Nelson developed the LabVIEW based data acquisition system for the unexploded ordnance clean-up proposal on Kaho'olawe in the Hawaiian Islands. The system collected data from a G12 GPS system in conjunction with the data from the EM61 ordnance detection hardware. The platform was the SAIC SE1415 ruggedized handheld computer (for which he also developed the custom Windows keyboard device driver). Data were displayable in real-time, archived, and could be processed by the operator in the field. The system was designed to reduce the time required for ordnance detection and verification by at least a factor of four.
Dr. Nelson has supported the DNA Thermal Radiation Simulation (TRS) test program for the past decade. He developed the control systems for all the existing TRS units including the German and United Kingdom TRS systems. His last work in this area was in the fielding of the Allen Bradley PLC5 based control system for the TRS component of the Large Blast Thermal Simulator at White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico. In conjunction with the controller support, he developed the THRIFT data file format and analysis software (for Windows and Unix based systems). THRIFT is a hardware and time independent data storage format he designed specifically for DNA to meet their constantly changing needs. The data format is based on a tagged linked list structure which allows any version of the data analysis software to read any version of the THRIFT data format on any hardware platform.
(1992-1994) Dr. Nelson designed and developed the real-time data acquisition system in the VENIX X-Windows environment for the NASA space shuttle Life Sciences Laboratory Equipment (LSLE) project. The system was designed to interface directly with LabTech Control, and thereby support all of the acquisition and I/O functionality within that application, as well as support thirty-two 12 bit analog data acquisition channels with a total continuous input and archiving rate in excess of 30,000 samples per second. Archived data was sent both to disk and the NASA High Rate Multiplexor (HRM) telemetry system. Non-native LabTech acquisition and the communication with the HRM system were implemented as a combination of VENIX device drivers and user level processes. VENIX is a real-time extension of AT&T UNIX.
(1985 - 1990) In support of the DNA above ground test series Dr. Nelson has designed, developed, and implemented the data acquisition and control systems for a series of non-ideal air blast experiments. These systems involved the remote monitoring of hundreds of real-time sensors and the control of dozens of actuators spread over a 9 acres. In support of the underground nuclear test series he instrumented the SAIC X-ray diode calibration facility and created an automated data analysis system. He also developed a method of monitoring the purity of a helium atmosphere based on a simple, but highly accurate, speed of sound measurement (unpublished). This piece of expendable instrumentation was three orders of magnitude more cost effective than the original proposal which required sacrificing a portable mass spectrometer.
While employed by SAIC he has been involved in a wide variety of projects. Because of his extensive computer experience he has been tasked to develop data acquisition and control systems on platforms ranging from custom 6502 based controllers to generalized control systems and drivers running in the Microsoft Windows environment. He also works with SUN workstations and CRAY computers on a regular basis. He has designed and built expert systems for several projects and have developed a method of hybridizing neural networks and expert systems. He has also been responsible for computer security on a wide range of systems.
As part of his dissertation work Dr. Nelson developed the TISAN software package. TISAN is a Time Series Analysis Environment which allows the user to quickly apply a variety of time series analysis techniques to a data set. The program is designed as an interactive signal processing laboratory along the lines of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) sponsored Astronomical Image Processing System (AIPS). TISAN was originally written for the MS-DOS operating system but was ported to the Microsoft Windows environment. TISAN supports Fourier transforms (FFT, DFT and the Ferrez-Mello Data Compensated DFT), Scargle Periodograms, digital filtering, Kalman filtering, smoothing, depopulation, convolution, and a variety of linear, logarithmic, and transcendental functions.
Besides being a seasoned Microsoft Windows applications developer, he is proficient in many computer languages and their dialects (C, C++, LabVIEW G, HTML, FORTRAN, BASIC, PLC5 Ladder Logic, and 6502 Assembly) and is experienced in several others (Java, Java Script, PERL, 8088 Assembly, PASCAL, LISP, PROLOG and SAIL). He has an extensive knowledge of a variety of operating systems (VMS, CTSS, UNIX, TOPS-10, MS-DOS, CP/M, R-DOS, IBM 7171, Microsoft Windows, Macintosh, etc.), and several expert system shells and neural network simulation packages (e.g., NEXPERT Object, ANSim). He has also developed a number of programming, scripting, and command languages and the associated parsers, compilers, and interpreters to use them (e.g., TISAN, ADCoS, RTSS).
August 1980 to December 1984
While working toward his Ph.D. in physics he was a graduate teaching assistant. His duties included the instruction of introductory astronomy courses, grading for advanced astrophysics and plasma physics courses, and instrumenting the Capilla Peak Observatory (data acquisition and reduction, software development, and electronics maintenance). He was responsible for the development of the lesson plans for those courses that he taught. He was also a regular observer at the Capilla Peak Observatory while he was doing his initial photometry work on RS CVn binary star systems.
January 1979 to December 1984
He has been employed at the VLA as a data reductionist and systems programmer for the Astronomical Image Processing System (AIPS). He has also used the facility as a visiting scientist on multiple occasions.
May 1981 to August 1981
He developed the spectral analysis data reduction package for the first generation Balloon-Born Gamma Ray Observatory using the Data General Eclipse minicomputer.
| The Harker School Faculty, | Fall 2003 | - AP Physics C |
| - Modern Physics | ||
| Spring 2004 | - AP Physics C | |
| - Modern Physics | ||
| West Valley College Associate Faculty, | Spring 2003 |
- Introductory Astronomy Lab (ASTRO002) |
| - Solar System Astronomy Lecture (ASTRO010) | ||
Fall 2002 |
- Introductory Astronomy Lab (ASTRO002) | |
| - Stellar, Galactic Astronomy and Cosmology (ASTRO011, 2 sections) | ||
| - Introductory Physics Substitute Teaching | ||
Spring 2002 |
- Introductory Astronomy Lab (ASTRO002) | |
| - Solar System Astronomy Lecture (ASTRO010) | ||
Spring 2001 |
- Introductory Astronomy Lab (ASTRO002) | |
Fall 2000 |
- Introductory Astronomy Lab (ASTRO002) | |
| Palomar College Associate Faculty, | Spring 1999 |
- Astronomy 100 Lecture |
Fall 1998 |
- Astronomy 100 Lecture | |
Spring 1998 |
- Astronomy 105 Lab | |
| San Diego Science Alliance Lectures, | 1994-1997 |
- Future of Technology in the Classroom |
| Leaf Erickson Elementary, San Diego CA, Guest Instructor, | 1996 |
- General Science |
| University of New Mexico Graduate Teaching Assistant, | 1980-1994 |
- Astronomy 101 Lecture; General Astronomy |
1980-1984 |
- Astronomy 111 Night Sky Laboratory and Lecture | |
1980-1984 |
- Physics Laboratories | |
1982 |
- Astronomy 270 Lecture; Introduction to Astrophysics | |
| Marie Hughes Elementary, San Diego CA, Summer Instructor, | 1981 |
- General Science |
| Commodore International, | 1980 |
- Computer Training and Education |
Available on Request
Copyright © 1996-2000, Eric
R. Nelson, Ph.D. , All Rights Reserved
11/23/05 ern