Bio
Dr. Nichols became the associate laboratory director for ORNL’s Computing and Computational Sciences in April 2009. In this position, he oversees the Department of Energy’s (DOE) National Center for Computational Sciences (NCCS), the site of the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF), which delivers state-of-the-art scientific research and technological innovations. The OLCF is home to Summit, the nation's most powerful computing resource. Nichols also leads ORNL’s agenda in advanced high-performance computing in priority areas such as materials science, fusion energy, and health data, as well as the laboratory’s quantum computing and artificial intelligence initiatives.
Prior to assuming his new position, Dr. Nichols was the deputy associate laboratory director of Computing and Computational Sciences, where he led efforts to build, install, and deploy next‑generation supercomputers for DOE, the National Science Foundation, and the Department of Defense. A theoretical chemist and software developer, Dr. Nichols joined Oak Ridge National Laboratory in 2002 as the director of the Computer Science and Mathematics Division, a position which he held until 2009. From 2005-2006, he was Acting Director of NCCS. Before coming to ORNL, he was the deputy director of the Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory at the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, where high priority was given to the development, deployment, and use of scalable computational science community codes to solve grand-challenge problems crucial to the nation.