Tino Nyawelo is a professor (lecturer) in the Department of Physics & Astronomy. His main area of research is physics education with the focus on equity/access in education. He is the Director of Undergraduate Research and coordinates the NSF Summer Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) Program.

In 2012, he founded the REFUGES program, a robust STEM-focused refugee and minority student support program with two distinct components: 1) an after-school program for middle- and high-school students; and 2) a summer bridge program for students transitioning to the University of Utah. REFUGES addresses the academic and cultural challenges of refugee youth in fifteen hours of programming per week on the U of U campus. Participants receive individual tutoring and mentoring, science enrichment activities, college and career readiness interventions, and workshops promoting healthy lifestyles. The program has impacted the lives of over 1,000 refugee youth living in the Salt Lake Valley.

In 2020, he joined the High School Project on Astrophysics Research with Cosmics (HiSPARC), a project in which high schools and academic institutions join forces and form a network to observe and measure ultra-high-energy cosmic rays with a ground-based scintillation detector. HiSPARC project started in the Netherlands in 2003, and in 2024 HiSPARC moved to University of Utah under his leadership and provided the initial infrastructure to imagine new research opportunities in K-12 science education. There are currently two projects that deploy HiSPARC cosmic ray detectors with high school students and teachers in Utah: 1) The InSPIRE Program (Investigating the Development of STEM-Positive Identities of Refugee Teens in a Physics Out-of-School Time Experience); and 2) A Research Experiences for Teachers (RET).

He obtained his master’s degree in theoretical high energy physics at the Abdus Salam International Center for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) in Trieste, Italy. He received his Ph.D. in theoretical physics from the Free University of Amsterdam.