Dr. Nelson is a biostatistician whose research interests has focused primarily on developing statistical methods to analyze correlated and categorical data, and studying agreement between physicians when classifying patients' screening and diagnostic test results.

Often screening and diagnostic tests rely on the interpretations of test results by radiologists and other trained medical professionals. Dr. Nelson's current research project, Modeling Agreement in Cancer Diagnostic Tests, is focused on developing statistical methods to assess reliability in large-scale cancer studies between physicians classifying patients according to an ordinal classification scale, where limited methods currently exist. She plans to use these methods to assess reliability in recently conducted large-scale breast cancer and breast density studies and to examine the impact of factors, such as rater experience and the patient's prior history, that can play important roles in reliability in these population-based settings. Due to widespread use of screening mammography in the community, conclusions drawn from our newly developed methods and the analyses of large-scale agreement studies in diagnostic testing will have significant and far-reaching implications for breast cancer screening and diagnosis in the community.