Nichols is the founder and CEO of Pollere, Inc, a network architecture and performance company based in California, US.
Prior to Packet Design she was director of advanced Internet architectures in the Office of CTO at Cisco Systems.
She has written about the problem of bufferbloat, which can lead to failure with Transmission Control Protocol congestion-avoidance algorithms.
[3] Beyond bufferbloat, Nichols has also published additional research on how to control queueing delay, how to improve network simulation with feedback, and how to navigate complexity to achieve high performance.
[4] From September 1984 to December 1985, Nichols was an assistant professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Oregon State University.