Alex Nelson
Computer Scientist at National Institute of Standards and Technology
Rockville, Maryland, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolAlex Nelson is a computer scientist with 14 years of hands-on experience building web applications and processing moderate-scale data, and is currently conducting digital forensics research at NIST. He led multiple public-facing projects early in his career (WACrimeStats, Paper Trail, Ask HYS) and has deep practical skills across languages and tooling from JavaScript and MySQL to Python, Bash, and storage forensics. As a long-term contributor to The Sleuth Kit, he has improved core file-system forensics tooling, enhancing robustness and DFXML compliance—work that bridges research and production-grade security engineering. His academic path through UC Santa Cruz’s storage and security groups toward a Ph.D. complements a pragmatic background in web services and data processing. Outside of tech, a history of orchestral performance and community music leadership hints at collaboration, discipline, and public engagement not obvious from his technical resume.
15 years of coding experience
2 years of employment as a software developer
BABS, Mathematics, Computer Science, BABS, Mathematics, Computer Science at The Evergreen State CollegeUniversity of California Santa Cruz
Github Skills (12)
c1710
filesystem10
incident-response10
c1110
computer-forensics10
xml9
c-language8
debugging8
it-security8
security8
cprogramming-language8
testing6
Programming languages (5)
Github contributions (5)
sleuthkit/sleuthkit
Mar 2013 - Aug 2014
The Sleuth Kit® (TSK) is a library and collection of command line digital forensics tools that allow you to investigate volume and file system data. The library can be incorporated into larger digital forensics tools and the command line tools can be directly used to find evidence.
Role in this project:
Backend Developer & Security Engineer
Backend Developer & Security EngineerContributions:10 commits in 1 year 5 months
Contributions summary:Alex primarily contributed to the Sleuth Kit codebase by addressing several issues related to file system and volume data investigation. Their work includes fixing a variable typo, ensuring non-null input for the `tsk_vs_open` function to prevent segfaults, correcting a documentation typo, and refactoring the Fiwalk tool to improve DFXML compliance, including updating the rusage reporting for more accurate resource usage information. They also added functionality to allow plugins to process certain virtual files.
command-linecommand-line-toolfilesystemsleuthkittct
ajnelson/diskprint_database
Jun 2013 - Feb 2015
Contributions:30 commits, 1 push in 1 year 8 months
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