Draft:Nels Andrew Olson

Nels A. Olson, American chemist, received a BA in biochemistry from Reed College in 1989, and in 1997, a Ph.D from the University of Washington in Analytical and Synthetic Organic Chemistry. After completing his education, Olson was a Fulbright Fellow at the Institute for Surface Chemistry in Stockholm, Sweden where he also lectured at the Royal Institute of Technology.

Biotech Industry
Upon his return from Sweden in 1999, Olson spent a number of years working in biotechnology instrumentation and reagents for several companies in California including Molecular Dynamics where he worked on the Human Genome Project. After the acquisition of Molecular Dynamics in 1998 by Amersham Pharmacia Biotech, Olson, along with the executive team, moved to Illumina Inc. where he was associate director for systems analysis and integration. There he acquired expertise in root-cause failure analysis which would inform much of his later work at Boeing.

Government Service
Moving to the East coast, Olson served as Program Manager and Principal Investigator at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, and the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) working on chemical and biological threat detection and mitigation. On November 3, 2009, while working for DHS, Olson gave the keynote address at a conference in Boston on detection and identification of pathogens, biological threats and infectious diseases. This was the work that occupied him at the DTRA as well, where he served as senior analyst and advisor to the Biological Detection and Diagnostics Division.

On April 5, 2006, Olson was named chief of the Preservation Research and Testing Division (PRTD) in the Preservation Directorate of the Library of Congress (LOC). While at LOC, Olson's remit included "expanding the lab's expertise and equipment" and "developing a robust science fellowship program." One of the large engineering projects that Olson supported for LOC was the building of the largest hermetically sealed encasement ever made for a document. This project, led by Elmer Eusman (third from left) and Olson (second from left) in collaboration with the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), built the housing for the 1507 Waldseemüller map. 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.

Boeing Company
Olson made the move back to the West coast starting a new career in aerospace at the Boeing company. In 2013 a number of problems had emerged with the use of rechargeable lithium-ion batteries in aircraft. Olson's investigations in root-cause failure analysis and corrective actions resulted in patents awarded to Boeing for methods in diagnosis and mitigation of these battery problems and the re-certification of the Boeing 787 aircraft.

During the height of the pandemic, Boeing instituted the Confident Travel Initiative (CTI) on May 14, 2020 to investigate the problems of virus transmission in aircraft cabins. Olson's work in this area 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, and in August 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). Olson was also the senior author on several of the peer-reviewed papers written on this subject during the pandemic. The substance of the following papers was presented at the by Angela Davis, Stephen Trent, and Casey Brantner.

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; 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.

Selected Publications
• Chapter Author, Department of Homeland Security, Chemical and Biological Countermeasures Division Strategic Plan, 2010, Washington, DC.

• Contributing Author, for Chemical and Biological Countermeasures Division, Basic Research Focus Areas Version 1.0 Published by the Department of Homeland Security, Science and Technology Directorate, May 2009