Jennifer Nelson is a biostatistician with expertise in designing and analyzing vaccine safety and effectiveness studies. She is particularly interested in developing new methods to overcome the challenges associated with using large, administrative health care utilization databases in vaccine research. Although her primary focus is vaccines, her methodological work has broader implications for studying the safety and effectiveness of other medical products, such as drugs, medical devices, and biologics.

As part of the Vaccine Safety Datalink (VSD) project, Dr. Nelson works with Group Health Research Institute (GHRI) colleague Andrea Cook, PhD, to improve statistical methods for post-marketing surveillance studies of new vaccines. Their goal is to develop new sequential testing approaches that will rapidly and accurately identify adverse events not detected in pre-licensure studies. Dr. Nelson also collaborates with the Food and Drug Administration to evaluate statistical methods for more general use in post-marketing safety surveillance of other medical products. In her vaccine effectiveness work, Dr. Nelson recently shed light on the limitations of the methods that previous epidemiological research used to assess the effectiveness of influenza vaccine in preventing illness and death in seniors. Her paper was the first to comprehensively describe the challenges in methods for assessing the public health benefit of influenza vaccine in the elderly; it was also the first to recommend specific new strategies to improve estimates of vaccine effectiveness. By sharing these statistical insights across a broad audience, she is helping bridge the gap between biostatistics and epidemiology and hoping to encourage widespread use of more rigorous methods. Dr. Nelson is excited to continue evaluating and developing methods to increase understanding of disease prevention and vaccine safety—and working to bring new, improved methods into the mainstream.

Dr. Nelson heads the Group Health Research Institute (GHRI) biostatistics unit, which includes seven PhD- and six Masters-level biostatisticians and five graduate students. She also chairs the VSD's Methodology Working Group, leading and setting priorities for collaboration on vaccine safety methods by statisticians at the VSD's eight sites. She is a past program chair of the American Statistical Association's Statistics in Epidemiology section and an affiliate assistant professor in biostatistics at the University of Washington (UW). Before joining Group Health, Dr. Nelson served for four years as the Deputy Director of the Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis (MESA) Coordinating Center at the UW.

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Recent publications

Nelson JC, Cook AJ, Yu O, Zhao S, Jackson LA, Psaty BM. Methods for observational post-licensure medical product safety surveillance. Stat Methods Med Res. 2011 Dec 2 [Epub ahead of print]. PubMed

Dublin S, Walker RL, Jackson ML, Nelson JC, Weiss NS, Von Korff M, Jackson LA. Use of opioids or benzodiazepines and risk of pneumonia in older adults: a population-based case-control study. J Am Geriatr Soc. Epub 2011 Sept 13. doi: 10.1111/j.1532-5415.2011.03586.x PubMed

Yu O, Nelson JC, Bounds L, Jackson LA. Classification algorithms to improve the accuracy of identifying patients hospitalized with community-acquired pneumonia using administrative data. Epidemiol Infect. 2011;139:1296-1306. PubMed

Jackson ML, Nelson JC, Jackson LA. Why do covariates defined by International Classification of Diseases codes fail to remove confounding in pharmacoepidemiologic studies among seniors? Pharmacoepidemiol Drug Saf. 2011 Jun 13. doi: 10.1002/pds.2160. [Epub ahead of print].

Jackson LA, Yu O, Nelson JC, Dominguez C, Peterson D, Baxter R, Hambidge SJ, Naleway AL, Belongia EA, Nordin JD, Baggs J. Injection site and risk of medically attended local reactions to acellular pertussis vaccine. Pediatrics. 2011 Mar;127(3):e581-e587. Epub 2011 Feb 7. PubMed

Jackson LA, Peterson D, Dunn J, Hambidge SJ, Dunstan M, Starkovich P, Yu O, Benoit J, Dominguez-Islas CP, Carste B, Benson P, Nelson JC. A randomized placebo-controlled trial of acetaminophen for prevention of post-vaccination fever in infants. PLoS One. 2011;6(6):e20102. Epub 2011 Jun 17. PubMed

Dublin S, Walker RL, Jackson ML, Nelson JC, Weiss NS, Jackson LA. Use of proton pump inhibitors and H2 blockers and risk of pneumonia in older adults: a population-based case-control study. Pharmacoepidemiol Drug Saf. 2010 Aug;19(8):792-802. Epub 2010 Jul 7. PubMed

Nelson JC, Bittner RC, Bounds L, Zhao S, Baggs J, Donahue JG, Hambidge SJ, Jacobsen SJ, Klein NP, Naleway AL, Zangwill KM, Jackson LA. Compliance with multiple-dose vaccine schedules among older children, adolescents, and adults: results from a Vaccine Safety Datalink study. Am J Public Health. 2009;99 Suppl 2:S389-97. PubMed

Jackson LA, Yu O, Nelson J, Belongia EA, Hambidge SJ, Baxter R, Naleway A, Nordin J, Baggs J, Iskander J. Risk of medically attended local reactions following diphtheria toxoid containing vaccines in adolescents and young adults: A Vaccine Safety Datalink study. Vaccine. 2009;27(36):4912-6. Epub 2009 Jun 28. PubMed

Jackson ML, Nelson JC, Jackson LA. Risk factors for community-acquired pneumonia in immunocompetent seniors. J Am Geriatr Soc. 2009;57(5):882-8. Epub 2009 Apr 21. PubMed

To view more publications, please see Dr. Nelson's CV.

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