Adjunct Professor
Georgetown University
Evolutionary Biologist
US National Institutes of Health (NIH)
Topic: Swine flu
Dr Nelson is a computational biologist who studies pathogen evolution. She uses large-scale genetic data to study rapidly evolving RNA viruses at the human-animal interface, including coronavirus and influenza. She has worked as a scientist at the National Institutes of Health since 2008, where she discovered the zoonotic origins of the virus that caused the 2009 H1N1 influenza pandemic and collaborates with scientists on seven continents to mitigate future pandemic threats. She received her PhD from the Pennsylvania State University’s Center for Infectious Disease Dynamics in 2008.