Nicholas H. Nelsen

About Me

I am joining UT Austin as an Assistant Professor in Fall 2026 

Welcome! I am an NSF Mathematical Sciences Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Mathematics at MIT, where I am hosted by Prof. Philippe Rigollet. I am also affiliated with LIDS, CCSE, IDSS/SDSC, and the UQ Group, where I collaborate with Prof. Youssef Marzouk. Broadly, my research interests lie at the intersection of computational mathematics and statistics. Using rigorous analysis and domain-specific insight, I develop novel data-driven machine learning methods for high- and infinite-dimensional problems, establish theoretical guarantees on the reliability and trustworthiness of these methods, and apply them in the physical and data sciences. My current work blends operator learning with ideas from inverse problems, generative modeling, and uncertainty quantification.

I received my Ph.D. from Caltech in 2024, where I was fortunate to be advised by Prof. Andrew M. Stuart and supported by the Amazon AI4Science Fellows Program and an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. My doctoral dissertation was awarded two "best thesis" prizes, one in applied mathematics and another in engineering. I obtained my M.Sc. from Caltech in 2020 and my B.Sc. (Mathematics), B.S.M.E., and B.S.A.E. degrees from Oklahoma State University in 2018.