Headshot of Nicole Nelson

I am an Associate Professor in the Department of Medical History and Bioethics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. I study complexity and uncertainty in biomedicine, with a particular focus on preclinical research with animal models. My book, Model Behavior, is an ethnography of a mouse behavior genetics laboratory where scientists were struggling with how to study complex psychiatric disorders in the controlled setting of the laboratory. My current project examines the “reproducibility crisis” in biomedicine, a recent phenomenon where scientists have found many supposedly stable findings to be difficult to replicate on subsequent investigation