Jelani Nelson

Jelani Nelson is a Professor and Department Chair in the UC Berkeley EECS Department (College of Engineering). His work focuses on theoretical computer science, particularly algorithms, data streams, dimensionality reduction, and privacy-preserving computation.

• Advising: Current students include Ishaq Aden-Ali, Xin Lyu, Mihir Singhal, and Hongxun Wu (co-advised with leading researchers).
• Education: PhD from MIT (George M. Sprowls Award), M.Eng from MIT.

Research Highlights:

• Developed foundational results in Johnson-Lindenstrauss dimensionality reduction (optimality, sparse embeddings).
• Advancements in differential privacy (lower bounds, private mean estimation, threshold learning).
• Pioneering work on streaming algorithms for heavy hitters, norm estimation, and graph problems.
• Innovations in compressed sensing and oblivious subspace embeddings.

Scientific Awards:

• PODS Best Paper Award (2011, 2022)
• IBM Pat Goldberg Memorial Best Paper Award (2011)
• George M. Sprowls Award for MIT doctoral thesis (2009)
• NeurIPS 2020 Spotlight Presentation