Jelani Nelson

Jelani Osei Nelson (Amharic: ጄላኒ ኔልሰን; born June 28, 1984) is an American Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences 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 was born to an Ethiopian mother and an African-American father in Los Angeles, then grew up in St. Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands. He studied mathematics and computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and remained there to complete his doctoral studies in computer science. His Master's dissertation, External-Memory Search Trees with Fast Insertions, was supervised by Bradley C. Kuszmaul and Charles E. Leiserson. He was a member of the theory of computation group, working on efficient algorithms for massive datasets. His doctoral dissertation, Sketching and Streaming High-Dimensional Vectors (2011), was supervised by Erik Demaine and Piotr Indyk.
After his doctorate, Nelson worked as a postdoctoral scholar at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute in Berkeley, California, then Princeton University and the Institute for Advanced Study. He specialises in sketching and streaming algorithms.
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 joining UC Berkeley in 2019. 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 opposes the proposed California Mathematics Framework, expressing concern that the modified curriculum will harm vulnerable students by denying them rigorous mathematical instruction. In an interview with The New Yorker, he stated: “I’m extremely worried that the C.M.F. is implicitly advocating for certain groups of people to be pushed away from rigorous math courses into essentially a lower track, setting back progress in improving diversity in STEM.” Nelson was involved in an online conflict with Stanford University professor Jo Boaler over efforts to revise California's framework for math instruction in April 2022.
Nelson founded AddisCoder, a summer program teaching computer science and algorithms to high schoolers in Ethiopia, in 2011 while finishing his PhD at Massachusetts Institute of Technology,. The program has trained over 500 alumni, some of whom have gone on to study at Harvard, MIT, Columbia, Stanford, Cornell, Princeton, KAIST, and Seoul National University, and to pursue PhDs in science and mathematics. Starting in 2022, Nelson also co-organized JamCoders, a summer algorithms and coding camp in Jamaica modeled on AddisCoder.
Nelson co-founded the David Harold Blackwell Summer Research Institute, which aims to increase the number of African-American students receiving PhDs in mathematics.