Dr Chris Nicol was awarded the B.Sc and Ph.D. degrees from the University of New South Wales, Australia in 1991 and 1995 respectively. He then joined AT&T Bell Labs in New Jersey as a Principal Investigator of Research from 1995 to 1998, working on Integrated Circuits for communications.

In 1998 Dr Nicol returned to Australia with the vision to create the first Bell Labs Research facility for Lucent Technologies in Asia Pacific. After establishing this team in Sydney, he went on to build a Wireless Product IC Design team responsible for designing integrated circuits for 3G mobile wireless infrastructure systems. From 2000-2003 he held the position of Head of Bell Labs Australia. In 2003 he transferred the Bell Labs Australia organization to Agere Systems and was the founder and Managing Director of Agere Systems Australia - a centre of excellence responsible for the design of digital base-band processors for Agere's 3G mobile wireless products. In 2006, he joined National ICT Australia (now NICTA) as Chief Technology Officer in the area of embedded systems.

He has served on the program committee of the International Solid State Circuits Conference, the International Low Power Symposium, the International Symposium on Circuits and Systems and as an editor of the IEEE Journal of Selected Areas of Communications (JSAC) and the IEEE Journal of Solid State Circuits (JSSC). He addressed the Australian Prime Minister's Science Engineering and Innovation Committee (PMSEIC) in June 2000, served on the Australian Major National Research Facility Selection Committee in 2001, the ICT Centre of Excellence Selection Committee in 2002 and was a member of the Board of the Australian Research Council (ARC) from 2001-2004. He currently serves on the Industry Research and Development Board. He currently holds 17 U.S. patents.