Nick Nelson

Nick Nelson changed colleges and his career path shortly into his freshman year. He began as a mechanical engineering major but soon transferred to UWM to study physics. Nelson especially enjoyed his courses with Philip Chang, a physics professor who specializes in theoretical astrophysics and cosmology. He worked with Chang for nearly three years on a project about classical dwarf novae, a type of binary star system. Nelson created a computational simulation, a computer program that allowed him to predict how these star systems would likely behave. He wrote a paper about these findings, which was accepted for publication in a peer-reviewed journal and settled a long-debated question about dwarf novae. Nelson earned his bachelor’s degree in physics in May and begins the doctoral program in astronomy at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville this fall.