Nicholas H. Nelsen

About Me

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

Welcome! I am a Klarman Fellow in the Department of Mathematics at Cornell University, where I am hosted by Prof. Alex Townsend and Prof. Yunan Yang. 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 the methods in the physical and information sciences. My work blends operator learning with ideas from inverse problems, generative modeling, and uncertainty quantification. A current focus of my research centers on data science tasks formulated in the space of probability distributions.

Previously, I was an NSF Postdoc in the Department of Mathematics at MIT. 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.