Tiffany Nichols

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Doctoral Candidate, Harvard University, History of Science

Attorney licensed in California and the District of Columbia, Registered Patent Attorney

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Tiffany Nichols is a Doctoral Candidate in the Department of the History of Science at Harvard University, a Graduate Student Affiliate at the Black Hole Initiative, and an NSF Grantee. Her current research focuses on how place, surrounding environment, and laboratory are embedded in the output signals of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO). In this vein, she focuses on how physicists and engineers understand what is a gravitational wave signal and what is merely noise generated by the instrument, its location, and surrounding environment.

Prior to her PhD studies, Tiffany earned both a Bachelor of Science (BS) in Electrical Engineering and a Juris Doctor (JD) at the University of Virginia. She has also held positions at The RAND Corporation, the University of California, Berkeley School of Law, and at highly ranked U.S. law firms, where she focused on intellectual property litigation, patent prosecution and portfolio management. In addition, Tiffany was Chair for the Forum of Graduate Student Affairs of the American Physical Society (APS) from 2019 to 2020. She will serve as a Member-at-Large for the Forum on the History of Physics of APS starting in 2021. She was also a member of the local organizing committee for the February 2021 Next-Generation Event Horizon Telescope Science Conference.

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E-mail: tiffany_nichols [at] g [dot] harvard [dot] edu

Twitter: @onthemasspike