Keith A. Nelson

For the New Zealand rugby union player, see Keith Nelson (rugby union).

Keith A. Nelson
Alma mater	Stanford University
Known for	Impulsive stimulated Raman scattering Terahertz spectroscopy
Awards	Coblentz Award (1988) Ahmed Zewail Award (2012) Ellis R. Lippincott Award (2012) Bomem-Michelson Award (2017) Frank Isakson Prize (2018) William F. Meggers Award (2021)
Scientific career
Fields	Physical chemistry
Institutions	Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Thesis	Laser induced phonon spectroscopy : optical generation of ultrasonic waves and investigation of electronic excited state interactions in condensed phases
Doctoral advisor	Michael D. Fayer
Other academic advisors	John P. McTague
Doctoral students	John A. Rogers
Website	nelson.mit.edu

Keith Adam Nelson is an American physical chemist, currently the Haslam and Dewey Professor of Chemistry at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Education and career

Nelson studied chemistry at Stanford University and received his B.S. in 1976, followed by a Ph.D. in physical chemistry at the same university in 1981. His thesis was supervised by Michael D. Fayer. Nelson then spent a year at University of California, Los Angeles as a postdoc with John P. McTague before joining Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a faculty member in the department of chemistry in 1982.

Honors and awards

Nelson won the 2021 William F. Meggers Award from the Optical Society of America "for expanding the horizons of impulsive stimulated Raman scattering (ISRS) to the generation of intense tunable terahertz pulses, thus establishing new transient-grating techniques for a more effective application of time-domain coherent nonlinear spectroscopy in the study of condensed phase molecular dynamics".