Nick serves as Managing Partner of PulseTor, LLC, and has Sales and Marketing responsibility. For the 3 years immediately prior to PulseTor, Nick served as a consultant for several instrument and software companies, assisting them in new product development and market introduction, and in establishing strategic partnerships and international distribution channels. In 1998, Nick and Jim founded AAT to build and repair Si(Li) detectors, a company which was sold to RJ Lee Group in 2004 and re-purchased by PulseTor in 2006.
In 1984, with critical assistance from Jim Nicolino and good friend Ron Johnson, Nick founded Peak Instruments, Inc., which he managed for 12 years before selling its WDS product line to Noran. While at Peak, Nick built an efficient light element analyzer capable of analyzing boron and phosphorus in BPSG glass, a thin film commonly used in the semiconductor process, and, in collaboration with David Ohara of Parallax, built the prototype of the first WDS system incorporating a highly efficient X-Ray optic collimator to enhance the intensity of light element X-Rays by nearly an order of magnitude.
Nick has also served as VP Sales and Marketing and Director of the Applications Laboratory for PGT, as VP Strategic Development for ADE Technologies, a manufacturer of capacitance gauges to measure displacement at very high precision and tools for measuring the magnetic properties of thin films for hard disk drives, and as Director of Product Development for RJ Lee Group.
Outside of the instrumentation field, Nick worked as a volunteer with the PA Department of Community and Economic Development to help organize the 2005 summit Creating Pennsylvania's Future, in which he chaired the track on Commercialization of University Technologies and authored the final track report. He is an active member of the Industrial Advisory Board for the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at Northeastern University. Nick has also recently served as a sub-committee chairman within ASTM, and is a member of several professional societies, including MSA and the Institute for Materials, Malaysia.
Earlier in his career, he authored a tutorial on Electron Probe Microanalysis that has been widely used as a reference material in many universities and technical schools. He holds a Ph.D. degree in Materials Science from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and a BS degree in Metallurgical Engineering/Materials Science from Lehigh University.