Dr. Nickerson is a former senior vice president of Bolt Beranek and Newman Inc. (BBN Technologies), from which he is retired. His Ph.D., in experimental psychology, is from Tufts University. He is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Psychological Association, the Association for Psychological Science, the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society and the Society of Experimental Psychologists. A past chair of the National Research Council's Committee on Human Factors (now the NRC Board on Human-Systems Integration), and a recipient of the Franklin V. Taylor Award from the American Psychological Association, he was the founding editor of The Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied and of Reviews of Human Factors and Ergonomics, a series published by the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society.
Dr. Nickerson's research interests include cognition, human factors and applied experimental psychology. His recent work at Tufts has focused primarily on probabilistic reasoning.