Resume
Congressional Fellowship
I spent a year working for Senator Ben Ray Lujan on his Commerce portfolio. I worked across the full technology policy landscape, including AI, cybersecurity, broadband, social media, data centers, telecommunications, transportation, and more.
I worked with offices on both sides of the aisle to draft and introduce legislation, wrote oversight letters, prepared talking points for interviews, attended closed-door meetings with CEOs, learned about quantum, privacy, broadband, and telecom from the top experts in the country, and held companies to account for their decisions. I got to be the expert who could explain why companies invest millions in cybersecurity in protecting what amounts to a bunch of numbers (neural network weights) or could ask lobbyists the technical questions that showed their company was not actually trying to solve the problem.
Read more about my day-to-day on the hill here: https://techcongress.io/blog/2026/6/3/day-in-the-life-of-a-techcongress-fellow-anna-nickelson
Ph.D. Work
I pursued a Ph.D. to gain a deep understanding of AI and its impacts on society. As such, I split my work to be 80% focused on the technical aspects and 20% on broader impacts.
My dissertation was focused on multi-objective decision making. Most of the difficult decisions we face are hard because there is no single right answer; each option has a different set of trade-offs to choose between. Humans are able to consider and balance these trade-offs, but most AI and computational systems are built to optimize one single objective. My dissertation studied how to leverage multi-objective decision making in traditional (non-learning) systems, evolutionary reinforcement learning, and ethical AI.
Science Communication
Science only means something if we can communicate it to others. However, this is a skill that is not often taught to scientists or academics. During my Ph.D., I sought to build this skill and help others do the same.
Doing:
- Friendly Scientist for Skype a Scientist – connect with K-12 classrooms around the country to engage students with AI, robotics, and careers in STEM
- Interview to discuss pursuing engineering without an engineering background: link
- Interview to discuss my research and broader goals in tech policy: link | blog post
Teaching:
- Developed Presentation Skills Seminar to help others understand the goals of a presentation, communication, and how to develop a stellar presentation
- Delivered workshop on Visually Representing Information
Project Management
Prior to graduate school, I spent 6 years working for Dolby Laboratories. During that time, I worked my way from an intern to an associate project manager.
My team was responsible for pushing for initiatives to improve the hand-off from product development to product support engineers. I oversaw the training and development program, which ran 40+ trainings a year for over 120 engineers and 400 salespeople across 40 offices worldwide. I managed technical summits ranging from one hour to four days with budgets up to $3.2M.
Rabble of Robots 