Nico Christianson

I am an incoming Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Johns Hopkins University (starting August 2026); I will be 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 will be spending a year as 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 Caltech’s Ben P.C. Chou Doctoral Prize in Information Science and Technology and Demetriades-Tsafka-Kokkalis Prize in Renewable Energy, as well as the ACM SIGEnergy Doctoral Dissertation Award. Before Caltech, I was an undergrad in applied math at Harvard.