Jennifer Nelson serves as Interim Vice Chancellor for Research and Innovation. In this role, she is responsible for UNL’s research enterprise, including enhancing research development and its societal impact, as well as ensuring the ethical, safe, and efficient conduct of research. She works with Industry Relations, NUtech Ventures and Nebraska Innovation Campus to forge partnerships and technology development that advance the state and region economically and socially. She oversees UNL’s university-wide research centers, the University of Nebraska State Museum, and the University of Nebraska Press.

Before becoming Interim Vice Chancellor, Nelson was most recently Associate Vice Chancellor and Research Integrity Officer in the UNL Office of Research and Innovation. She worked closely as liaison to UNL’s university-wide research centers and major research core facilities and co-led a campus-wide effort to develop a comprehensive research data strategy. She was also Institutional Official with responsibility for several compliance areas, including the protection of human research participants, care and ethical treatment of animals, and the conflicts of interest program. Prior to joining the Office of Research and Innovation in 2019, Nelson was the Director of Administration in the UNL Center for Brain, Biology and Behavior from 2015-2019.

Nelson is research faculty in the Department of Psychology, and since her arrival at UNL in 2009, she has been a co-investigator in a National Institutes of Health funded laboratory studying children’s cognitive development and health outcomes. Specifically, her research has focused on the development of executive control in longitudinal samples from early childhood through adolescence, and implications of executive control abilities for mental and physical health.

Nelson received her undergraduate degree in psychology from UCLA, her Ph.D. in clinical child psychology from the University of Kansas, and completed a predoctoral clinical internship at Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital Stanford and the Children’s Health Council.