Youngju Nielsen is a Professor at the Sungkyunkwan University Graduate School of Business (SKK GSB) in Seoul, where she chairs the AI MBA program, and the founder and CEO of Korea Retirement Pension Data, an AI-driven startup that helps Koreans plan and prepare for retirement.

Before joining academia in 2015, Dr. Nielsen spent more than 15 years as a quantitative investment professional on Wall Street. She was Chief Investment Officer at Quantavium Capital Management in New York and Head of Systematic G10 Rates Trading at Citigroup. Earlier she was Head of Quantitative Principal Strategies at J.P. Morgan. She also held senior research roles at Barclays Global Investors (now BlackRock), State Street Global Advisors, and Allianz Dresdner Asset Management, where she led the quantitative research team.

Dr. Nielsen advises some of Korea's leading financial institutions. She serves as an independent director of Korea Investment Management and Korea Value Asset Management, and advises the Bank of Korea's Reserve Management Group and the Daishin Economic Research Institute. She previously served as an independent director of Franklin Templeton Hana, as a member of the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy's Business Restructuring Review Committee, and as an advisor to the Government Employees Pension Service and Samsung Asset Management. In 2024 she received a Commendation from the Minister of Trade, Industry and Energy.

She is the author of eight books on investing, economics, and artificial intelligence, including The Rules of Wall Street Quant Investing and Global Investment War, and co-author of Intelligent Hedge Fund Investing (Risk Books). A widely read commentator, she writes columns for The Korea Economic Daily and Hankyung Magazine, and has written for Maeil Business Newspaper, the Hankook Ilbo, Weekly Donga, and Weekly Chosun.

Dr. Nielsen holds a Ph.D. in Statistics from the University of Pittsburgh, where her dissertation developed a new artificial neural network algorithm and applied it to NYSE stock selection. She also holds a Master of Financial Engineering from the University of California, Berkeley, and a B.A. in Economics from Yonsei University. She was admitted to the United States under the EB-1 "extraordinary ability" category and, in 2021, became the 200th recipient of Korea's dual citizenship for outstanding global talent.