Rate My Professor Erica Nelson

Erica Nelson is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Astrophysical and Planetary Sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder, where she also serves as a Fellow at the Center for Astrophysics and Space Astronomy. She received her Ph.D. in Astronomy from Yale University in 2016, advised by Pieter van Dokkum, with a thesis titled 'The Spatial Distribution of Star Formation in Galaxies: Observing the Emergence of Galactic Structure.' She earned her B.A. in Physics and Astronomy from Pomona College in 2008. Nelson's career includes a NASA Hubble Fellowship and Institute for Theory and Computation Fellowship at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics from 2018 to 2020, and a postdoctoral fellowship at the Max-Planck-Institut für Extraterrestrische Physik in Munich, Germany, from 2016 to 2017. She joined the University of Colorado Boulder as Assistant Professor in 2020.

Nelson's research program focuses on galaxy formation and evolution, exploring how the universe evolved from a uniform state shortly after the Big Bang to the diverse galaxies observed today. She utilizes cutting-edge observational techniques, particularly with the James Webb Space Telescope, alongside cosmological hydrodynamical simulations to investigate the growth of galaxies and supermassive black holes at their centers. Key contributions include discoveries such as the accelerated formation of ultra-massive galaxies in the first billion years ('Nature', 2024), a small and vigorous black hole in the early universe ('Nature', 2024), photons from dwarf galaxies reionizing the universe ('Nature', 2024), carbonaceous dust grains in the first billion years ('Nature', 2023), and intense star-forming galaxies at redshifts z > 10 ('Nature Astronomy', 2023). Her influential work, recognized by the 2026 Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship in Physics, 2025 Clarivate Highly Cited Researcher status, and NASA Hubble Fellowship, provides critical constraints on theoretical models of galaxy formation and advances understanding of high-redshift structures.