Elizabeth Nelson

Elizabeth “Betsy” Nelson, PhD (Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa), is an Assistant Professor at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, where she leads the Metagenomics Laboratory for ancient and modern DNA. She previously held a Marie Curie Sklodowska Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Microbial Paleogenomics Unit at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, France. She completed her doctoral degree at the Max Planck Institute in Jena, Germany.

Her research explores environmental microbes and pathogen evolution in human and non-human hosts. She combines genomics, socio-political, environmental, and demographic data to study how social forces shape microbial profiles and pathogen evolution, collaborating with Indigenous communities to reconstruct microbial histories, challenge colonial narratives, and develop effective counter measures to current problems in public health.