Nolte received his BA in 1981 from
Cornell University and worked at
DESY (Deutsches Electronen-Synchroton) on a
DAAD scholarship before attending the
University of California, Berkeley, where he received his PhD in Solid State Physics in 1988 under Eugene Haller and
Leo Falicov. After graduation, he spent one year as a post-doctoral member of staff at AT&T
Bell Labs working with Alastair Glass in the Optical Materials Department in Holmdel, NJ. Nolte joined Purdue in 1989 as an Assistant Professor and received the
NSF Presidential Young Investigator Award in 1991. He was promoted to Associate Professor in 1994 and later to Full Professor in 1999. Nolte is the author of three trade nonfiction books that popularize the history of science: Mind at Light Speed (Free Press, 2001), Galileo Unbound (Oxford University Press, 2018), and Interference (Oxford University Press, 2023). He also has authored physics textbooks on modern dynamics and biointerferometry. Based on patents from his NSF-funded research, Nolte co-founded two biotech start-up companies. Quadraspec, Inc., founded in 2004, commercialized the BioCD technology that was marketed by Antech Diagnostics beginning in 2008 for canine health screening. Animated Dynamics Inc. (ADI), founded in 2011, is developing biodynamic Doppler imaging (BDI) for cancer therapy selection. ==Awards and honors==