A San Francisco plastics executive who trades acrylic sheets for the formula for transparent aluminum in Star Trek IV.
Dr. Nichols is the plant manager of Plexicorp, a manufacturer of plexiglass in San Francisco, in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. Montgomery Scott and Leonard McCoy visit him posing as a visiting professor and his colleague, because they need large acrylic sheets to build a whale tank in the captured Klingon bird-of-prey.
With no money to pay, Scott offers Nichols the formula for transparent aluminum, a material not invented until much later, reasoning that Nichols may have been its inventor. The trade gives the crew the materials for the tank. He was played by Alex Henteloff.