Draft:Nels Andrew Olson: Difference between revisions

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Nels Andrew Olson, American chemist, was born October 17, 1960 in Portland, Oregon. He is best known for his work in the development and synthesis of fluorogenic probes, high throughput analysis of biomolecules, the design of aerosol experiments for the study of disease transmission, and his work in the implementation of root cause analysis and corrective actions methods for complex systems.

Early Career

Olson began his career as a shipbuilder and ship’s engineer, working primarily in the Alaskan Fishing Industry for Icicle Seafoods, Nuka Point Fisheries and others (1978-1993). While building vessels for the Alaskan fishing industry, Olson was employed at Margaret's Marine Ways, Bayside Machine Works, and Ross Troyer Boat Works. His apprenticeship was spent building the Nuka Island^[2], one of Alaska’s premier crabbing and tendering vessels. At Ross Troyer Boat Works he was one of three welder/fitter/fabricators who built the Sea Mist and other whale back designs under owner operator Ross Troyer. His experience at sea and in other high risk environments prepared him for his later scientific work where the operational robustness of systems was also essential.

Education

Olson obtained a B.A. in Biochemistry from Reed College in 1989 and worked as a synthetic carbohydrate chemist for Richard P. Haugland at Molecular Probes Inc. in Eugene, Oregon before returning to graduate school at University of Washington in Seattle (1993 to 1997). Olson's experiences working at Molecular Probes Inc. furthered his understanding of biological pathways, and structures, and the tools used to study them. His synthetic products included derivatives of the quinazolinones (ELF 97™) enzymatic substrates used to visualize the structures in the retina of the zebra fish and many other structural and process studies.^[3]

Olson's graduate education included extensive training in chemical separations, detector development, and complex signal processing with an emphasis on surface analysis of biomolecules and polymers in a non-vacuum environment. In addition, he studied biosynthetic pathways with Dr. Heinz G. Floss^[4] and performed syntheses in support of classical "feeding" experiments with isotopically labeled precursors to biosynthesis. During his final two years of graduate school, Olson also worked at the Positron Emission Tomography facility (University of Washington Medical Center) building robotic synthesis platforms for C-11 metabolic pathway probes.

Olson was awarded his Ph.D. in Chemistry in 1997. His dissertation advisor was

Upon his return to the United States, Olson was employed by Molecular Dynamics as a Staff Scientist in the Advanced Research Team (ARTeam) in Dr. David L. Barker’s group where he studied and developed biocompatible surfaces for the manufacture of high throughput analysis instruments (MegaBACE™ and others). He and his team also built the first 96 capillary, variable wavelength, laser induced endogenous fluorescence, electrophoresis instrument, and demonstrated its peak capacity and sensitivity for multidimensional protein and peptide separations.

After the purchase of Molecular Dynamics by Amersham Pharmacia Biotech in 1999^[1], Olson followed the executive team to the start up company, Illumina Inc., where he was an Associate Director and Senior Staff Scientist. There, Olson led teams of scientists and engineers in industrial failure analysis (forensics), building forensic analysis systems, implementing the FDA’s Quality System Regulations, part 820 of the Code of Federal Regulations title 21, and finally, building integrated robotic systems for synthesis, analysis and packaging of biotechnology products.

In 2007, Olson also filled in as the Director of Bio-Analysis at Insilicos Inc., and served on their Science Advisory Board from 2001 to 2012. In 2007, the company received a $1 million grant^[6] from the National Human Genome Research Institute to carry forward work on the Trans-Proteomic Pipeline (TPP), an open-sourced software suite for the analysis and visualization of mass spectrometry (MS) data. And in 2010 the company secured a $1.2 million grant^[7] from the National Institutes of Health for the analysis of biomarkers in the study of heart disease.

U.S. Federal Government

From 2006-2007 Dr. Olson took a civically oriented post as the chief of the Preservation Research Division at the

While at LOC Olson’s work included serving on the Inter-agency Work Group on Digital Data, the Library of Congress Strategic Planning Team, and the Continuation of Operations Program for emergency scenarios. One of the large engineering projects that Olson supported was the building of the largest hermetically sealed encasement ever made for a document. In service of that project, Olson raised over $227,000 in donations from Alcoa Foundation, among others, and provided technical support, including the engineering of the monitoring and manifold systems for the encasement. This project, led by Elmer Eusman (third from left) and Olson (second from left) in collaboration with NIST, built the housing for the 1507 Waldseemüller map.^[10]. This map, the Universalis Cosmographiae, was based on data provided to Waldseemüller by Amerigo Vespucci, and was the origin of the modern name of the continents America.

From 2007-2010 Olson served as a senior level program manager for the

In 2009, Olson offered the keynote address at the 15th Detection Technologies conference[12]. In that year, Olson also authored the Science & Technology Basic Research Focus Areas^[13] and portions of the High-Priority Technology Needs^[14] documents for DHS, And he was a contributing author on the DHS Chemical and Biological Countermeasures Division Strategic Plan.^[15]

In 2010, Olson joined the

While still at Johns Hopkins, the Intergovernmental Personnel Act made Olson a Mobility Program appointee to work on projects for the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) where he served as senior analyst and advisor to the Biological Detection and Diagnostics Division^[16]

Boeing

In 2012 Olson made the move back to the West coast starting a new career in aerospace at the Boeing company. At Boeing, Olson is a Program Manager for the chemical analysis group and runs a team of individual contributors working on root cause failure analysis and corrective action science and engineering. This team's work is almost entirely on system level failures rather than component issues, and is often at the forefront of investigations at the corporate level.

During the pandemic Olson was enlisted in the Confident Travel Initiative (CTI) team where he was one of four senior program managers who designed Boeing’s system to analyze the likelihood of aerosol-based disease transmission. Olson's work on this initiative was a continuation of the threat identification work he had done at DHS. There he had identified technologies with promise, notably the work of David Silcott at "S3i"., and in August of 2020, Olson's Boeing team collaborated with S3i and others on the biological aerosol detection project undertaken under the aegis of the United States Transportation Command (USTRANSCOM).^[17] Olson was also the senior author on several of the peer-reviewed papers written on this subject during the pandemic.^[18]

While at Boeing, Olson has been one of the principal architects of a number of initiatives. These have included the development and implementation of environmental testing; continuous variable measures for the analysis of corrosion^[19]; the capability to test, in real-time, fire suppressants in a full-scale aircraft cargo mockup; and finally, the real time analysis of engine emissions while utilizing synthetic biofuels. The emissions projects have been focused on the challenges for operational mitigation of contrails sponsored by Dr. Steven Baughcum and the Boeing Company^[20]

Personal Life

As a child, Olson lived in an unincorporated area near Portland called Garden Home. His father, Oscar Henry Olson, was an early employee and electrical engineer for Tektronix, and his mother, Mary Josephine Olson, was trained as a nurse and dedicated her life to the work of charity.

Nels Olson is married to Nataliya Olson, M.Sc. in Civil Engineering and a CPA who is also trained as a fraud investigator.

Selected Publications