Nicholas Nelsen

2025 Rising Star

B.S. Mathematics '18

 

Nick earned three bachelor’s degrees from OSU in 2018: one in mathematics, another in aerospace engineering and a third in mechanical engineering. He went on to get his master’s and Ph.D. from Caltech, where he studied under Andrew Stuart with the support of the Amazon AI4Science Fellows Program and an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. His doctoral dissertation on the “statistical foundations of operator learning” was awarded the W. P. Carey & Co. Prize in Applied Mathematics and the Centennial Prize for the Best Thesis in MCE. 

 

Nick is currently a Klarman Fellow in the Department of Mathematics at Cornell and will become a tenure-track assistant professor at The University of Texas at Austin in Fall 2026. He works in the areas of computational mathematics and machine learning.

 

Nelsen’s research develops novel artificial intelligence methods for high- and infinite-dimensional problems, establishes mathematical guarantees on the reliability and trustworthiness of these methods, and applies the methods in the physical, engineering, and data sciences.  

 

Nick received the SIAM Review SIGEST award in 2024 from the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics. Previously, he held a National Science Foundation (NSF) Mathematical Sciences Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in the Department of Mathematics at MIT.