Profile
Jennifer Nelson is Director of Biostatistics and a Senior Investigator at Kaiser Permanente Washington Health Research Institute and an Affiliate Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Washington. Her research focuses on methods to quantify post-market safety and effectiveness for vaccines and drugs, with an emphasis on addressing statistical challenges of using electronic health record data from large health care systems. She has authored over 80 publications, primarily in this area. Since 2009, Dr. Nelson has provided national leadership as Methods Core Lead and Senior Statistician for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA)’s Sentinel Network that facilitates rapid safety surveillance for FDA-regulated medical products. She has also led the Methodology Committee for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention sponsored Vaccine Safety Datalink (VSD) project, a national multi-collaboration that has monitored vaccine safety in the U.S. since 1990. Dr. Nelson earned the 2009 VSD Margarette Kolczak Award for outstanding biostatistical contributions in the field of vaccine safety. Her 2013 paper that adapted group sequential monitoring methods to a real-world observational vaccine safety data setting was one of the American Journal of Epidemiology’s Articles of the Year. She received her PhD in Biostatistics at the University of Washington in 1999.