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.

Early life and education

Nelson is from 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, 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.

Career

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, developing the Sparse Johnson-Lindenstrauss Transform, and an asymptotically optimal algorithm for the count-distinct problem. 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.

AddisCoder

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.

Awards and honours