William "Bill" Nichols joined the SEI in 2006 as a senior member of the technical staff and served as a Personal Software Process (PSP) instructor and Team Software Process (TSP) coach. Before joining the SEI, Nichols led a software-development team at the Bettis Laboratory near Pittsburgh, where he had been developing and maintaining nuclear engineering and scientific software for 14 years. Nichols has a doctorate in physics from Carnegie Mellon University.