Dr. Shouleh Nikzad
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Speaker Bio:
Dr. Shouleh Nikzad is a Senior Research Scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a peer-reviewed position conferred by the Director and the Office of the Chief Scientist in recognition of her achievements. She is also a Principal Member of the Staff and she leads the Advanced Detector Arrays, Systems, and Nanoscience Group at JPL. Shouleh is a Visiting Faculty at Caltech’s Physics Math, and Astronomy Division and a Visiting Scientist at Cedar Sinai Medical Center’s Neurosurgery Department. Dr. Nikzad’s interests in research span a wide range of fields, including materials, devices, astrophysics, space weather, and medicine. Her work in non-equilibrium techniques to modify surface and interface bandstructures has pioneered high performance imaging devices. She has initiated, developed and managed successful and innovative technology development programs spanning many topics including the human-eye-inspired curved focal plane arrays, and nanostructure based devices. Shouleh’s work on single photon counting UV imaging has produced world record sensitivity in UV that enables future NASA missions mapping of the intergalactic medium, studying primitive bodies as well as Europa and its moons. Her team also holds the record on low energy ion and neutral detection energy threshold thereby enabling compact and low power instruments for Space Weather and mass spectrometry. Shouleh is the recipient of several awards including the Lew Allen Award of Excellence, NASA Space Act Awards, JPL Instrument Division Team awards, and the TAP Team award. She is a fellow of the American Physical Society, a Senior member of IEEE and has been recognized and featured by the IEEE’s Women in Engineering (2011), SPIE’s Women in Optics (2012,2013), and the Society for Women Engineers (2013) for being a pioneer and role model. She is a founding member of the Society for Brain Mapping and Therapeutics (SBMT), recipient of its 2013 Pioneer in Medicine Award, and is now serving as the president of SBMT. She holds a PhD in Applied Physics from Caltech, a MSEE from Caltech and a BS degree in Electrical Engineering (Electrophysics) from USC. She has over 50 peer-reviewed publications and holds over 15 US patents. |