Jelani Nelson

Jelani Osei Nelson is a Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley. He won the 2014 Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers. Nelson is the creator of AddisCoder, a computer science summer program for Ethiopian high school students in Addis Ababa.

Nelson is interested in big data and the development of efficient algorithms. He joined the computer science faculty at Harvard University in 2013 and remained there until 2019 before joining UC Berkeley. He is known for his contributions to streaming algorithms and dimensionality reduction, including proving that the Johnson-Lindenstrauss lemma is optimal (with Kasper Green Larsen), developing the Sparse Johnson-Lindenstrauss Transform (with Daniel Kane), and an asymptotically optimal algorithm for the count-distinct problem (with Daniel Kane and David P. Woodruff). He holds two patents related to applications of streaming algorithms to network traffic monitoring applications. Nelson was the recipient of an Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award in 2015 and a Director of Research Early Career Award in 2016. He was awarded an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellowship in 2017.

Nelson founded the AddisCoder program in 2011 whilst finishing his PhD at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a summer program teaching computer science and algorithms to high schoolers in Ethiopia. The program has trained over 500 alumni, some who have gone on to study at Harvard, MIT, Columbia, Stanford, Cornell, Princeton University, KAIST, and Seoul National University.