Jelani Osei Nelson (Amharic: ጄላኒ ኔልሰን; born June 28, 1984) is an American Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley.

Nelson is the creator of AddisCoder, a computer science summer program for Ethiopian high school students in Addis Ababa.

[18][19][20] Nelson founded AddisCoder, a summer program teaching computer science and algorithms to high schoolers in Ethiopia, in 2011 while finishing his PhD at Massachusetts Institute of Technology,.

[21] The program has trained over 500 alumni, some of whom have gone on to study at Harvard, MIT, Columbia, Stanford, Cornell, Princeton, KAIST, and Seoul National University, and to pursue PhDs in science and mathematics.

[22] Nelson co-founded the David Harold Blackwell Summer Research Institute, which aims to increase the number of African-American students receiving PhDs in mathematics.