Jennifer Clark Nelson, PhD

“As national statistical leaders, we promote the use of rigorous methods that enhance drug and vaccine safety monitoring in the United States.”

Jennifer Clark Nelson, PhD

Director, Biostatistics; Senior Investigator, Kaiser Permanente Washington Health Research Institute
Affiliate Professor of Biostatistics, University of Washington

Jen.Nelson@kp.org
206-287-2004

Curriculum vitae (CV)

Biography

Jennifer Clark Nelson, PhD, is a senior investigator and biostatistician with expertise in methods to assess drug and vaccine safety and effectiveness for studies that use electronic health care data.

Dr. Nelson provides national statistical leadership and strategic direction for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA)’s Sentinel Initiative, an active surveillance system for monitoring the safety of all FDA-regulated medical products after they have reached the market. She also leads safety research within the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)-sponsored Vaccine Safety Datalink (VSD), a national collaboration involving 13 health care organizations that has monitored immunization safety in the United States since 1990. Her CDC service further includes membership on the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) COVID-19 Vaccine Safety Technical Work Group to help inform recommendations on the use of these vaccines in the U.S.

As part of both the VSD and Sentinel projects, Dr. Nelson works with her Kaiser Permanente Washington Health Research Institute (KPWHRI) colleagues Andrea Cook, PhD, and David Carrell, PhD, to pilot and scale up innovative sequential monitoring, machine learning, and natural language processing approaches that rapidly and accurately identify adverse events not detected in pre-licensure studies. Her 2013 study of the safety of a pentavalent combination DTaP-IPV-Hib (Pentacel) childhood vaccine put some of these ideas into practice and was selected as one of the American Journal of Epidemiology’s 10 best articles of the year. She and her clinical KPWHRI research partner, Lisa Jackson, MD, MPH, lead the CDC’s surveillance effort to proactively monitor the safety of the new herpes zoster vaccine for adults (Shingrix).

Dr. Nelson is an affiliate professor in biostatistics at the University of Washington (UW) and has been KPWHRI’s director of biostatistics since 2014. In collaboration with the UW, she and Dr. Cook co-founded the Seattle Symposium on Health Care Data Analytics, a conference designed to confront challenges and promote learning from electronic health record data. In 2009, Dr. Nelson earned the VSD’s Margarette Kolczak Award for outstanding contributions in biostatistics and epidemiology in vaccine safety. She is also a fellow of the American Statistical Association.

Research interests and experience

Biostatistics

Post-marketing drug and vaccine safety study design and analysis; secondary use and misuse of large electronic health care databases for medical research; vaccine effectiveness study methods; sequential testing in observational data settings; methods to assess interrater variability
Vaccines & Infectious Diseases

Biostatistics; post-marketing vaccine safety study design and analysis; influenza vaccine effectiveness in the elderly; methodological issues in large multi-site health care database studies
Medication Use & Patient Safety

Biostatistics; post-marketing drug and vaccine safety study design and analysis; safety signal detection methods; methodological issues in large, multi-site health care database studies
Aging & Dementia

Biostatistics; statistical issues in longitudinal observational cohort studies
Cardiovascular Health

Recent publications

Carr JJ, Nelson JC, Wong ND, McNitt-Gray M, Arad Y, Jacobs DR Jr, Sidney S, Bild DE, Williams OD, Detrano RC. Calcified coronary artery plaque measurement with cardiac CT in population-based studies: standardized protocol of Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis (MESA) and Coronary Artery Risk Development in Young Adults (CARDIA) study. Radiology. 2005;234(1):35-43. PubMed

Robbins J, Nelson JC, Rautaharju PM, Gottdiener JS. The association between the length of the QT interval and mortality in the cardiovascular health study. Am J Med. 2003;115(9):689-94. PubMed

Bild DE, Bluemke DA, Burke GL, Detrano R, Diez Roux AV, Folsom AR, Greenland P, Jacob DR Jr, Kronmal R, Liu K, Nelson JC, O'Leary D, Saad MF, Shea S, Szklo M, Tracy RP. Multi-ethnic study of atherosclerosis: objectives and design. Am J Epidemiol. 2002; 156(9):871-881. PubMed

Yanez ND III, Kronmal RA, Nelson JC, Alonzo TA. Analyzing change in clinical trials using quasi-likelihood. Journal of Applied Statistics. 2002;29(8):1135-1145. PubMed

Rautaharju PM, Nelson JC, Kronmal RA, Zhang Z, Robbins J, Gottdiener J, Furberg CD, Manolio T, Fried L. Usefulness of T-axis deviation as an independent risk indicator for incident cardiac events in older men and women free from coronary heart disease (the Cardiovascular Health Study). Am J Cardiol. 2001; 88(2):118-23. PubMed

Nelson JC, Pepe MS. Statistical description of interrater variability in ordinal ratings. Statistical Methods in Medical Research. 2000;9(5):475-496. PubMed

Ludman EJ, McBride CM, Nelson JC, Curry SJ, Grothaus LC, Lando HA, Pirie PL. Stress, depressive symptoms, and smoking cessation among pregnant women. Health Psychol. 2000;19(1):21-7. PubMed

McBride CM, Curry SJ, Lando HA, Pirie PL, Grothaus LC, Nelson JC. Prevention of relapse in women who quit smoking during pregnancy. Am J Public Health. 1999;89(5):706-11. PubMed

Hellerstedt WL, Pirie PL, Lando HA, Curry SJ, McBride CM, Grothaus LC, Nelson JC. Differences in preconceptional and prenatal behaviors in women with intended and unintended pregnancies. Am J Public Health. 1998;88(4):663-6. PubMed

McBride CM, Curry SJ, Grothaus LC, Nelson JC, Lando H, Pirie PL. Partner smoking status and pregnant smoker's perceptions of support for and likelihood of smoking cessation. Health Psychol. 1998;17(1):63-9. PubMed