Josh Nielsen, PhD
I am an industrial and systems engineer in Louisville, Kentucky, and I founded Phlox Engineering to build solutions for people whose work I have taken the time to understand.
How I think about the work
Industrial engineering is the discipline behind lean manufacturing and Six Sigma. It trains you to see any kind of work as a system, with inputs, steps, hand-offs, rules, and the places where time and quality slip away. I have found that view carries almost anywhere: a plant floor, a public health review queue, an architect's drawings, or a small company's marketing.
AI tools have changed how quickly I can act on that view. A few years ago, learning a new field and building software for it took months. Today, with enough persistence and the right tools, I can learn how a team works, build something that fits its existing methods, and put it in their hands quickly. I am still discovering how far that reaches, and I enjoy that.
My doctoral work earned the Houchens Prize for Outstanding Dissertation, the University of Louisville's top dissertation honor for my graduating class. I value that rigor most for what it prevents: careless shortcuts, untested edge cases, and results that look right but are not.
A new field in every role
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2025 to present
Founder and Engineer
Phlox Engineering, LLC · Louisville, KentuckyBuilt and licensed AutoTagger for an architecture firm, built Functionable for a client now using it daily, taught a manufacturer's owner to run his own AI tools, and presented a facilities work order automation prototype at an International Facility Management Association conference.
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2025 to 2026
Research Data Scientist
Houston Methodist Hospital · RemoteWon a $50,000 pilot award within three months, delivered a data mining and analysis framework adopted as an approved scope of work at two institutions, built an AI-assisted labeling workbench, and validated a model predicting rapid kidney disease progression on more than 90,000 patient records.
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2024 to 2025
Data Scientist
CDC National Center for Injury Prevention and Control · RemoteDesigned experiments comparing language model pipelines for classifying public health reports, uncovered reliability failures that overall accuracy concealed, and built a review app that measured where the model diverged from expert judgment.
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2018 to 2025
Researcher and PhD Candidate
University of LouisvilleCreated Promptimizer, designed a multi-agent consensus method for classification, adjudicated ground truth for more than 200,000 social media texts, defined a new test-sequencing problem for living kidney donors, and published four peer-reviewed papers.
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2018 to 2019
Continuous Improvement Intern
Yanfeng Automotive Interiors · Louisville, KentuckyDesigned and implemented a streamlined material delivery system that reduced cost by $600,000, and improved workstations to raise throughput and reduce waste.
Education and recognition
- PhD, Industrial Engineering, University of Louisville, 2025
- BS, Industrial Engineering, University of Louisville, 2020
- Houchens Prize for Outstanding Dissertation, 2025
- Outstanding Research Award, University of Louisville, 2024
- Honorable Mention for an AI poster, INFORMS Healthcare Conference, 2023
- Outstanding Service Award, University of Louisville, 2022
- Doctoral Fellowship, University of Louisville, 2020
Selected publications
- "The Single-Dependence Sequential Testing Problem for the Living Kidney Donor Workup Process." Soft Computing, 2025.
- "Automated Classification of Living Kidney Donation Experiences on Reddit." JMIR AI, 2025.
- "Social Network Analysis of Illicit Organ Trading Networks: The Medicus Case." Trends in Organized Crime, 2023.
- "Classifying Comments on Social Media Related to Living Kidney Donation." JMIR Medical Informatics, 2022.
Tell me about the part of your work that makes you say “There's got to be a better way to do this!”
The first conversation is free and takes thirty minutes. You describe the work, and I tell you honestly whether I can help and what a first step would look like.