| Shouleh Nikzad | |
| Birth Place: | Tehran |
| Workplaces: | California Institute of Technology Jet Propulsion Laboratory |
| Alma Mater: | California Institute of Technology University of Southern California |
Shouleh Nikzad is an Iranian-American electronic engineer and research scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. She leads the Advanced Detector Arrays, Systems, and Nanoscience Group. Her research considers ultraviolet and low-energy particle detectors, nanostructure devices and novel spectrometers. Nikzad is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, the National Academy of Inventors and SPIE.
As an undergraduate, Nikzad majored in electronic engineering at the University of Southern California.[1] She moved to California Institute of Technology for graduate studies, where she earned her Ph.D. in 1983.[2] Nikzad investigated compound materials (including zinc sulfide and cadmium sulfide) that had been produced through ion beam sputtering using laser spectroscopy.[3]
Nikzad was appointed an electro-optics engineer at Pacific Infrared.[4] She moved to the Argonne National Laboratory as a graduate fellow in 1998, before joining California Institute of Technology as a postdoctoral fellow in 1990. After two years at Caltech, Nikzad moved to Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), where she focused on imaging and detector systems.[5] At the JPL, Nikzad designed curved imaging systems, which, inspired by the human eye, can support high quality imaging in large telescopes.
As of 2019, Nikzad is a senior research scientist and principal engineer at JPL where she leads the Advanced Detector Arrays, Systems, and Nanoscience Group.[6]