About

Jennifer Nelson is an Assistant Professor in the College of Education at the University of Illinois. She holds a PhD in Sociology from Emory University, earned in 2018, and a BA in Sociology from Columbia University, obtained in 2008. Her research interests include Organizational Behavior and Theory, Organizational Sociology, Diversity and DEI, Qualitative Methods and Ethnography, as well as Mixed Methods and Survey Research. Nelson has received notable awards such as the Michael Fullan Emerging Scholar in Professional Capital and Community Award in 2020 and the AERA Division A Outstanding Dissertation Award in 2019. Her scholarly work explores issues related to organizational dynamics, inequality, and social ties within educational and workplace settings, contributing to the understanding of gender and racial disparities, trust and respect at work, and organizational processes.

Research topics

• Medical education
• Sociology
• Computer Science
• Psychology
• Engineering
• Engineering management
• Pedagogy
• Medicine
• Mathematics education
• Engineering ethics

Selected publications

• Risk-Sensitive Control With Multi-Armed Bandit Adaptive Sampling

  IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control · 2026-01-01

  articleSenior author

  We propose a risk-sensitive (RS) control algorithm that optimizes the entropic risk measure (ERM). RS control minimizes the impact of high cost but low probability outcomes in dynamic decision making. ERM is a time-consistent, convex measure of risk with tunable sensitivity. Our ERM-sensitive method combines online adaptive multistage sampling, RS upper confidence bound action selection, and sample-based estimation of ERM. Unlike many other RS control approaches, our method is applicable to problems with both discrete and continuous state spaces, and it does not require knowledge of the underlying transition probabilities. This makes our approach particularly useful in a wide variety of RS reinforcement learning domains. We show <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$O(\log M / M)$</tex-math></inline-formula> errorbounded convergence under mild conditions and demonstrate the numerical performance on two RS benchmark problems with discrete and continuous state spaces, respectively.

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• Enhancing STEM Graduate Student Teaching: The Cultivation of Teaching Skills and Identity among Graduate Students

  2025-08-21

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• Sharing Our Insights after Serving as Rotators at the National Science Foundation

  2025-08-21

  articleSenior author
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• Work in Progress: Preparing an Interdisciplinary cohort of Postdoctoral Scholars for Convergent Quantum Education Research

  2025-08-21

  article1st authorCorresponding
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• Complexity of Faculty Pedagogical Development Within the Changing Higher Education Environment

  Higher education · 2025-01-01 · 2 citations

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• Complexity of Faculty Pedagogical Development Within the Changing Higher Education Environment

  Higher education · 2024-12-19

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• Exploring GTA Skills and Responsibilities to Inform a GTA Professional Development Program in Computer Science

  2021 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference Content Access Proceedings · 2024-02-20

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This work-in-progress paper describes the process and initial outcomes of an effort to identify and prioritize content for a newly established GTA training program in a computer science department. As part of an NSF-funded project that aims to transform teaching practices in highly enrolled gateway STEM courses, the computer science (CS) department at a research-focused state institution is working to integrate active learning practices in its CS 1 (freshman level) and CS 2 (sophomore level) courses. The combined courses have enrollments of nearly 1,000 students each semester, with lecture sections of 100-200 students and software lab sections of 25-30 students. Lab sections are led by GTAs, and hence GTA professional development plays a large role in transforming the teaching and learning approaches in these courses. The CS department at the center of this study is growing rapidly, as the university in which it is housed is devoting significant resources to growing computing programs and emphasizing the importance of computing competencies across majors. As such, the number of GTAs needed to support courses in the CS department is also rapidly increasing, and finding students to fill GTA roles is sometimes difficult. New GTAs are often new graduate students, many of whom are enrolled at a US institution for the first time. Recognizing that nearly all of the CS GTAs (over 75 in total) face similar challenges related to a lack of training and/or experience in college teaching, the department aims to create a department-wide GTA training program. To understand the main challenges faced by CS GTAs and to inform the development of a GTA training program that makes the most effective use of limited resources (specifically funding, GTA time, and instructor time), the CS department is surveying GTAs, as well as instructors whose courses are supported by GTAs. GTAs are asked what skills they view as most important to their success in fulfilling their GTA responsibilities and their perceived level of preparation for those responsibilities. GTAs' perceived level of preparation provides a window into their teaching self-efficacy, which can be measured over time to track teaching development [1]. GTAs are also asked to describe what resources (including human) they access in an effort to prepare for their teaching responsibilities. Instructors whose courses are supported by GTAs are asked what they view as primary GTA responsibilities, the skills required to succeed in those responsibilities, and in what areas additional GTA preparation would be most valuable. This paper will present the findings from analysis of the data collected from surveying CS GTAs and instructors. Analysis will identify common themes across GTA and faculty responses, as well as any relationships between GTA responses and factors such as GTA role (lab, recitation, course level, etc.), demographic information, and level of teaching experience. In addition, the paper will describe initial plans for the structure and content of department-wide GTA professional development as they emerge from analysis of survey results. We suggest that this work-in-progress paper be presented as a poster in order to support in-depth discussion with other participants who are also developing and/or studying GTA professional development programs. [1] S.E. DeChenne, L.G. Enochs, and M. Needham, "Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics Graduate Teaching Assistants Teaching Self-Efficacy," Journal of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, Vol. 12, No. 4, December 2012.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Voronoi Progressive Widening for Cognitive Radar Tracking with Large Waveform Libraries

  2024-05-06 · 2 citations

  articleSenior author

  We apply an improved variant of Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS), MCTS with Voronoi Progressive Widening (VPW), to cognitive radar tracking. Because cognitive radar systems have unparalleled waveform agility across an immense parameter space, reinforcement learning techniques must deal with large, multi-dimensional action spaces. Prior applications of MCTS are inefficient because they uniformly explore new actions without regards to available information. We demonstrate how a Voronoi partitioning based scheme improves on the exploration of new waveforms leading to better combined tracking performance and radar resource usage in a standard benchmark tracking scenario.

  PublisherDOI

• Where’s My Whiteboard? The Challenge of Moving Active-learning Mathematics Classes Online

  2021 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference Content Access Proceedings · 2024-02-20 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This research paper studies the challenges that mathematics faculty and graduate teaching assistants (GTAs) faced when moving active and collaborative calculus courses from in-person to virtual instruction. As part of a larger pedagogical change project (described below), the math department at a public Research-1 university began transitioning pre-calculus and calculus courses to an active and collaborative learning (ACL) format in Fall 2019. The change began with the introduction of collaborative worksheets in recitations which were led by GTAs and supported by undergraduate learning assistants (LAs). Students recitation periods collaboratively solving the worksheet problems on whiteboards. When COVID-19 forced the rapid transition to online teaching, these ACL efforts faced an array of challenges. Faculty and GTA reflections on the changes to teaching and learning provide insight into how instructional staff can be supported in implementing ACL across various modes of instruction. The calculus teaching change efforts discussed in this paper are part of an NSF-supported project that aims to make ACL the default method of instruction in highly enrolled gateway STEM courses across the institution. The theoretical framework for the project builds on existing work on grassroots change in higher education (Kezar and Lester, 2011) to study the effect of communities of practice on changing teaching culture. The project uses course-based communities of practice (Wenger, 1999) that include instructors, GTAs, and LAs working together to design and enact teaching change in the targeted courses alongside ongoing professional development for GTAs and LAs. Six faculty and five GTAs involved in the teaching change effort in mathematics were interviewed after the Spring 2020 semester ended. Interview questions focused on faculty and GTA experiences implementing active learning after the rapid transition to online teaching. A grounded coding scheme was used to identify common themes in the challenges faced by instructors and GTAs as they moved online and in the impacts of technology, LA support, and the department community of practice on the move to online teaching. Technology, including both access and capabilities, emerged as a common barrier to student engagement. A particular barrier was students’ reluctance to share video or participate orally in sessions that were being recorded, making group work more difficult than it had been in a physical classroom. In addition, most students lacked access to a tablet for freehand writing, presenting a significant hurdle for sharing mathematical notation when physical whiteboards were no longer an option. These challenges point to the importance of incorporating flexibility in active learning implementation and in the professional development that supports teaching changes toward active learning, since what is conceived for a collaborative physical classroom may be implemented in a much different environment. The full paper will present a detailed analysis of the data to better understand how faculty and GTA experiences in the transition to online delivery can inform planning and professional development as the larger institutional change effort moves forward both in mathematics and in other STEM fields. We suggest a roundtable or traditional presentation method for this paper. Kezar, A., &amp; Lester, J. (2011). Enhancing shared leadership: Stories and lessons from grassroots leadership in higher education. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press. Wenger, E. (1999). Communities of practice: Learning, meaning, and identity (1st pbk. ed..). Cambridge University Press.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Goal reasoning for intelligent parameter adaptation in active sonar

  The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 2024-10-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Active sonar systems include a variety of parameters that can be dynamically tuned to improve system performance. In practice, however, parameters are typically set and fixed over long periods based on expected environmental conditions, prior performance, etc. Dynamic tuning of system parameters by sonar operators is impractical due to both the short time frame between adaptations and the complex relationship among the parameters, goals, and system performance. In intelligent active sonar, the system tunes parameters based on a set of goals and evaluation of how well those goals are being met. This approach significantly reduces the cognitive load on the operator, who can set high-level goals that are interpreted by the system and translated into low-level parameter adjustments. Goal-driven autonomy (GDA), for example, detects discrepancies between predictions and observations and generates context-specific explanations when significant discrepancies are observed. These explanations may indicate that new goals need to be introduced or existing goals de-activated. The explanation generation and goal formation aspects of GDA provide insight into how the intelligent system is reasoning about its actions and allow an operator to have direct input to the intelligent system when desired.

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Recent grants

• Designing Teaching: Scaling up the SIMPLE Design Framework for Interactive Teaching Development

  NSF · $572k · 2013–2019

• CAREER: Detection and Estimation in Complex and Uncertain Environments

  NSF · $450k · 2010–2017

Frequent coauthors

• Margret Hjalmarson

  U.S. National Science Foundation

  132 shared

• Janet Callahan

  Boise State University

  81 shared

• Shannon L. Bartelt‐Hunt

  University of Nebraska–Lincoln

  81 shared

• Jena Asgarpoor

  University of Nebraska–Lincoln

  81 shared

• Yuting Chen

  Hebei Medical University

  81 shared

• Robyn Sandekian

  University of Colorado System

  81 shared

• Lee Rynearson

  Campbell University

  81 shared

• Kathleen E. Wage

  George Mason University

  62 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Human Resources

  University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

  2005

• M.S., Human Resources

  University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

  2001

• B.S., Human Resources

  University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

  1999

Awards & honors

• Michael Fullan Emerging Scholar in Professional Capital and…
• AERA Division A Outstanding Dissertation Award, American Edu…