Sure, just use a "Update item" action, and use your SLT email value in the People field.
SharePoint will then resolve the user accordingly. (It's the same thing as using the quik edit mode and copy-pasting in the new column : your user is resolved by SharePoint) 

it worked, but then when i try to grab info from the user profile based on my new people picker column it errors and says cant find the persons profile

What action are you using "Query LDAP" ? 

Or are you using the runtime function userProfileLookup() ? the correct syntax is: userProfileLookup(Current User,"PreferredName")
(do not put quotes around the first parameter)

Please mark my post are resolved, since we resolved the issue of your post 😉

my goal is to first xfer the names listed in the "name1" column  from single line of text and copy the name into a people picker column "Name2" so I can then pull info from the uder profile to populate persons work location, dept from their user profile

First I did a "update item" ,field: Name2 with list lookup , source: current item, Field  " Name2"

it worked and appeared to xfer the names into the people picker field

then I did another "update item" action to set field "location" equals user profile, source:  selected location, when Account name equals: Value and selected  "Item properties" "Name2"

It errors and says cant find user profile for the person.

I cant post a screen shot since its work related, but any help would be greatly appreciated

I have an "update item action"

Be careful when you get the "Name2" field in your update item action.
It's not impossible that you are getting the PreferredName (i.e. "Allan Hub Collab") or DisplayName instead of the LoginName (i.e. "i:0#.w|hcallg"). I was not able to replicate, but if you have Nintex enterprise, could you try to use the Query User Profile action and see what you get ?

unfortunately i dont have the query user profile action available . we dont have enterpriuse. in the past the way i described how i pulled the info worked when i would manually enter the persons name in the people picker field. I think theres some type of disconnect when the info is moved from Name1 to Name2.

Yeah, I suppose that if you type manually the name in the person field, the User Information list is populated but not when it's by workflow. This might be something like this.
When you add manually, the "ensureUser()" function is called in the background, adding this user to the hidden list (I suppose), but not when using Nintex.
Where you able to retrieve data from your account (it's the only one we know for sure it's in the User Info list) ?

here is a screen shot of the update item action i made to update the location column from "location" found in the user profile

the workflow to retrieve data from the user profiles failed. is there anyway to have the ensure user function addedd to the copied column. If i were to get a list of all their email addresses, then change the peopel picker field to display email, if i were to upload the emails via open in access, maybe that would have ensure user added

no same problem