Affiliate Lecturer (retired)
Electrical Engineering
School of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics
University of Washington Bothell
Box 358538
18115 Campus Way NE
Bothell, WA 98011-8246
(No on-campus office.)
C: 425-765-9574
kd1uj@uw.edu
nicole@nicolehamilton.com
I started my teaching career here at Bothell in June 2013 as a Capstone adviser. I thought I was volunteering to do it for free and was surprised to find it paid. Without a PhD, it was never on my radar that I would someday be teaching at a university. I love teaching and feel honored and delighted every day that I get to do this. I love working with my students and I loved working again in core EE.
Beginning September 2017, I will be at the University of Michigan for a three-year appointment in their CSE (Computer Science and Engineering) department. Perhaps someday I will be back. I will always have very fond memories of my students, my colleagues and the staff at Bothell.
I have a BS and MS EE from Stanford (1973) and an MBA valedictorian from Boston University (1987). I am a life senior member of the IEEE and a registered professional engineer in Texas and Massachusetts. In 2014, I was inducted as an eminent engineer by the Stanford chapter of Tau Beta Pi.
I have 11 issued patents and my publications have received over 3300 citations. A paper on search engine ranking I co-authored at Microsoft won a 10-year test-of-time award at the 2015 International Conference on Machine Learning.
I have spent my career as a designer, most of that as an entrepreneur. Every design project I can think of that I have ever worked on has always started as a blank sheet of paper. This is what I think I can teach you.
I started my career in gate-level chip design at IBM in the 1970s building a reliable serial communications chip, a display processor and various other hardware devices. But most of my work has been in software.
I'm the author of Hamilton C shell, now a little over 250K lines of C. In December 1988, my C shell became the first multithreaded third-party application to ship on a PC. It remains the only multithreaded Unix shell in existence on any OS.
I was also the 9th member of the team at Microsoft that created the Bing search engine. I personally wrote the query language (the compiler) and ranker for our first release, which went live in January 2005. My code, roughly 30K lines of C++ out of a little over 300K in the backend, decided what our users were looking for, searched our index and then ordered the results. This was both the best and the worst job I have ever had.
Here at UWB, I advised numerous Capstone teams and taught the BEE 233 and BEE 332 circuits and transistors labs, BEE/CSS 371 business of technology (a course in entrepreneurship) and BEE 271 digital circuits, several times each. Summer 2016, I taught EE/BEE 271 digital design on both the Bothell and Seattle campuses alternate days of the week.
After so long in software, one of the best parts of my experience at Bothell was working again on core EE topics I loved so much at Stanford and IBM so many years ago and getting a chance to build stuff.
My UW netid, kd1uj, is my Amateur Extra callsign, though I confess I haven't been on the air in years. I've been an avid bicyclist all my life. I'm liberal and I care deeply about civil rights, especially for LGBT.
