The March 2026 Career Stories featured Nick Stelzner, AI Support Specialist at the University of Washington

Written by: Roshni Singh, Career Stories team

Conversation with Nick Stelzner: AI, Research Development, and the Future of Institutional Innovation

For the March 2026 Career Stories, we chatted with Nick Stelzner, who holds a unique role as an AI Support Specialist at the University of Washington, where he supports the integration of large language models (LLMs) across academic, athletic, research, and administrative environments. With a career including roles as a NASA SBIR-funded CEO, laboratory manager, and research development specialist, Nick’s unique blend of technical insight, strategic leadership, and end-user experience to institutional AI adoption helps him lead AI community-of-practice initiatives, runs monthly training, and manages campus-wide support requests for UW’s LLM tool, Purple. His work focuses on increasing AI literacy across faculty, staff, and students while balancing diverse levels of expertise from advanced researchers to newcomers exploring AI for the first time.

Nick describes his career path as exploratory rather than linear, where his experience started as bringing research to market, first exposure to grants, and then working across research labs, industry, and academia, in animal research systems at Washington State University and the University of Idaho, including hands-on lab, and working with Grizzy bears. Once he went to a NORDP conference and took a class with Jess Brassard, he realized all the specialization/skills that people bring to their own teams. Around the same time, GPT3 was released which became a turning point in his career, offering a practical entry into AI-assisted work and sparking his transition toward institutional AI support. He believes in understanding that AI is a predictive text algorithm and finding a way to harness AI to make the work more manageable, not becoming a replacement for actual workers

Nick credits NORDP with expanding its professional network and leadership opportunities, particularly through conference involvement and working groups. He is still very active in NORDP where Nick serves as a Co-Rep for the Pacific Region and an active member of the Conference Planning Committee.

Nick is happy to answer any questions you have for him so please feel free to contact him at nrcs@uw.edu.