Director of Research, Division on Addiction, Cambridge Health Alliance, and Associate Professor, Department of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School
Dr. Nelson’s work covers many facets of addiction, including the relationship between psychiatric comorbidity and DUI offense, how best to develop community recovery environments for youth with substance use problems, and the distribution and determinants of gambling and gambling problems. Dr. Nelson’s DUI work began with her collaboration on an NIH R01 grant to study substance abuse and mental health in repeat DUI offenders. Analyses of this sample demonstrated considerable psychiatric comorbidity and a relationship between that comorbidity and DUI re-offense. Based on this work, Dr. Nelson has been the PI on a multi-year set of projects focused on applying that research to clinical practice. Through these projects, she has led the development and implementation of a mental health assessment system (the Computerized Assessment and Referral System: CARS) at DUI programs across the state of Massachusetts, a randomized clinical trial of CARS at two of those agencies, and a six-month follow-up with more than 300 DUI offenders enrolled in the study. In 2017, she led the expansion of CARS activities to include six national pilot sites who used the program with their DUI clients. CARS was released publicly in June 2017 at www.carstrainingcenter.org. Since then, Dr. Nelson has led the creation of adaptations of CARS that have included diagnostic updates, a Spanish version of the CARS screener, and a version of CARS that can be used in more general behavioral health settings.