Jelani Osei Nelson (Amharic: ጄላኒ ኔልሰን; born June 28, 1984) is an American professor who teaches electrical engineering and computer sciences at the University of California, Berkeley. He received the 2014 Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers. Nelson founded AddisCoder, a summer computer science program for high school students from Ethiopia who live in Addis Ababa.
Early life and education
Nelson was born to an Ethiopian mother and an African-American father in Los Angeles. He grew up in St. Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands. He studied mathematics and computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and stayed there to finish his doctoral studies in computer science. His Master's thesis, titled External-Memory Search Trees with Fast Insertions, was guided by Bradley C. Kuszmaul and Charles E. Leiserson. He was part of the theory of computation group, where he worked on creating efficient algorithms for large datasets. His doctoral dissertation, Sketching and Streaming High-Dimensional Vectors (2011), was supervised by Erik Demaine and Piotr Indyk.
After completing his doctorate, Nelson worked as a postdoctoral scholar at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute in Berkeley, California. He later worked at Princeton University and the Institute for Advanced Study. He specializes in sketching and streaming algorithms.
Career
Nelson is interested in big data and creating efficient algorithms. He worked as a computer science professor at Harvard University from 2013 until 2019, when he moved to UC Berkeley. He is known for his work on streaming algorithms and reducing the complexity of data. He proved that the Johnson–Lindenstrauss lemma is optimal, developed the Sparse Johnson–Lindenstrauss Transform, and created an algorithm that solves the count-distinct problem efficiently. He holds two patents for using streaming algorithms to monitor network traffic. In 2015, he received an Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award, and in 2016, a Director of Research Early Career Award. He was also awarded an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellowship in 2017.
Nelson is against the proposed California Mathematics Framework. He is worried that the new curriculum may not give all students the same quality of math education, which could harm some students and reduce diversity in STEM fields. He expressed these concerns in an interview with The New Yorker. In 2022, he had an online disagreement with Stanford professor Jo Boaler about changes to math instruction in California.
In 2011, while completing his PhD at MIT, Nelson started AddisCoder, a summer program that teaches computer science and algorithms to high school students in Ethiopia. The program has trained more than 500 students, some of whom have attended universities like Harvard, MIT, Columbia, Stanford, Cornell, Princeton, KAIST, and Seoul National University. They have also pursued PhDs in science and math. In 2022, Nelson helped start JamCoders, a similar summer program in Jamaica.
Nelson co-founded the David Harold Blackwell Summer Research Institute. The program aims to help more African-American students earn PhDs in mathematics.
Awards and honours
Received the 2022 ACM Eugene L. Lawler Award. Received the 2017 Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers. Received the 2017 Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship. Received the 2011 George M. Sprowls Award for Outstanding Doctoral Thesis. Received the 2010 IBM Research Pat Goldberg Memorial Best Paper Award.