Jonathan M. Nelson Assistant Professor of Entrepreneurship and Education
Brown University
Welcome
Education economist studying how education systems build the human capital that drives innovation and economic growth.
My current projects examine whether schools can teach innovation, how personalized adaptive learning performs at scale, how college students learn to use generative AI to become experts, and whether diversity initiatives help high-potential women engineers land better jobs.
I am an invited researcher at J-PAL’s Science for Progress Initiative and was a National Academy of Education/Spencer Dissertation Fellow (2023). My research has been funded by the Stanford King Center on Global Development, the Weiss Fund for Development Economics, the What Works Hub for Global Education, the Annenberg Institute, and The Agency Fund.
I received my Ph.D. in Economics and Education from Teachers College, Columbia University (2024) and was a postdoctoral fellow at the Stanford King Center on Global Development (2025).
An innovation curriculum raised participation in an innovation competition by 8 percentage points, the quality of student ideas, and skills in exploration, idea generation, fluid intelligence, and problem solving.
Personalized adaptive learning in government schools raised mathematics achievement by 0.39 SD over two years, about 1.8 additional years of learning.
Preliminary results
A two-year program for high-potential women engineering students raised placements at established multinational employers by about 11 percentage points.
Children's literacy and numeracy scores by phone match their in-person scores skill by skill, and the pooled difference is a precisely estimated null.
