Hello, world! My name is Nicole.

🔬 I work on adversarial AI and machine learning at Los Alamos National Laboratory.

💻 My research sits at the intersection of computer vision and the physical world — mostly how object detection models can be made to fail.

🎓 M.S. in Information Security, AI Engineering focus, Carnegie Mellon — Rales Fellow.

🎞️ In my free time, I love taking and developing film.

About me

Hi! I’m a post-master’s researcher at LANL’s Advanced Research for Cyber Systems group where I work on adversarial AI and machine learning — mostly at the intersection of computer vision and the physical world.

I earned my M.S. in Information Security with a focus in AI Engineering at Carnegie Mellon as a Rales Fellow, and studied Applied Computer Science at Birmingham-Southern College. I’m interested in how AI systems fail in the physical world, and what that means for building ones that are actually trustworthy under adversarial conditions.

Outside of trying to break things, I am incredibly interested in supporting first-generation minorities in STEM. I am the Vice President of Operations for the NM Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers Chapter and a co-lead for the CMU Rales Alumni Network.

Always happy to connect with people working in adversarial ML, computer vision, mentorship, and inclusivity in STEM fields.

Selected projects

A few things I’ve built and broken. See all →

Giving AI a Headache

An acoustic attack that degrades YOLO11 object detection by physically resonating the camera itself.

GoNoGo

A quality-gated CI/CD pipeline spanning three Terraform-provisioned GKE clusters.

StayAwake

Real-time computer vision that detects lost focus from eye closure, yawning, and head orientation.

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