Nico Christianson

I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Johns Hopkins University, affiliated with the Data Science and AI Institute, the Ralph O’Connor Sustainable Energy Institute, and the Algorithms and Complexity Group. 📢 I am recruiting PhD students to join my group at Johns Hopkins in Fall 2027. Learn more →

My research lies broadly at the intersection of algorithms, machine learning, and optimization. I am particularly interested in developing theoretically-grounded algorithms and AI/ML frameworks for reliable decision-making under uncertainty, motivated by applications of broad societal importance like energy and computing systems. My recent interests include:

• online and learning-augmented algorithms
• uncertainty quantification and risk-aware decision-making
• AI/ML for optimization
• applications to energy resource optimization and data center workload scheduling

Before joining Johns Hopkins, I was a Stanford Energy Postdoctoral Fellow, hosted by Ellen Vitercik and Ram Rajagopal. Previously, I did my PhD in Computing and Mathematical Sciences at Caltech, where I had the good fortune of working with Adam Wierman and Steven Low. My PhD was supported in part by an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship and a PIMCO Data Science Fellowship, and my dissertation won the ACM SIGEnergy Doctoral Dissertation Award, as well as Caltech’s Ben P.C. Chou Doctoral Prize in Information Science and Technology and Demetriades-Tsafka-Kokkalis Prize in Renewable Energy. Before Caltech, I did my undergraduate studies in applied math at Harvard.