Jack M. Nilles

Jack Nilles was educated as a physicist, heading the preliminary design of several space vehicles and communications systems for the U.S. Air Force and NASA. During this period he was a consultant to President Kennedy's and Johnson's Science Advisory Council, the National Science Foundation and other federal departments. One day a regional planner asked him why, with all this high technology, the engineering community couldn't solve the traffic problem. "Why can't you get people to work at home instead of cluttering up the freeways?"

This question triggered Nilles' imagination, to the point where he left the aerospace industry and joined the University of Southern California as Director for Interdisciplinary Research. With support from the National Science Foundation he began his formal research on "telecommuting" and "teleworking", terms he coined in 1973.

Since then he has developed, encouraged and/or evaluated telework projects for a variety of Fortune 100 companies, local, state, and federal government agencies in the U.S., Europe (including the European Commission), Southeast Asia, and South America. He is a founding director and Past President of ITAC, the International Telework Association and was a member of the Management Group of the European Community Telework/Telematics Forum.

His research, beginning in the 1970s, has also covered alternative energy technologies (solar, ocean thermal) and a variety of futures research and related forecasting areas. His blog covers many of these issues.

Nilles is the author of five books, including The Telecommunications-Transportation Tradeoff, the original book on telecommuting, as well as dozens of chapters of books, professional papers and articles. His 1982 book, Exploring the World of the Personal Computer, accurately forecasted much of todays computer-rich society. His latest book, titled Managing Telework, is widely known as "the Bible of Telework".

He received the Rod Rose award from the Society of Research Administrators for his work on interdisciplinary research. His work also received the 1991 Innovations award from the Council of State Governments for the California Telecommuting Project.

He is an avid photographer and has contributed cover photos for classical music CDs produced by his wife, Laila's, company, Protone Records.