Peter Nelson, MD

About Peter Nelson

Dr. Nelson is the Mary Louise Todd Chair for Cardiovascular Research, and Professor and Section Chief of Vascular Surgery in the Department of Surgery. He obtained his medical degree and completed General Surgery residency at the University of Massachusetts. He then completed research training in the Harvard-Longwood Vascular Surgery Research Fellowship and a Vascular Surgery fellowship at Dartmouth Geisel School of Medicine. He is board certified in Vascular Surgery.

Medical Interests Areas of Interest: Dr. Nelson has served as the Program Director of the OU Vascular Surgery Fellowship Program, the only one of its kind in Oklahoma. His specific educational interests center around optimized team training and surgical simulation in both open and endovascular surgical procedures. His team plans to leverage the resources available at the Simulation Center at OU- Tulsa (SCOUT) to develop novel programs to serve the OU students, residents and fellows, faculty, and outreach to caregivers throughout the greater Tulsa community. Dr. Nelson also has interest in career decision-making in medical students and spends significant mentoring and advising student in this regard. Research Interests: Dr. Nelson’s clinical research focuses on emerging device development and clinical trials in vascular intervention in order to bring cutting edge technology to the patients in our community long before it is broadly available. His translational science research interests focus on genomic/proteomic predictors of outcomes in vascular surgery and personalized medicine. This program employs state-of-the-art high-throughput molecular techniques to analyze the entire genome and metabolome for patterns of inflammatory changes either at baseline or perioperatively to identify patient-specific signatures that predict eventual clinical outcome from intervention. His research has been funded by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute of the NIH. Finally, his health services research interests utilize state, regional, and national health care data to identity trends in the utilization of endovascular therapies and associated disparities in access to these technologies and resulting differences in clinical outcomes. Special Clinical Interests: Dr. Nelson’s clinical interests include minimally invasive endovascular approaches to all vascular disease – thoracic and abdominal aortic aneurysm repair, percutaneous intervention for carotid stenosis and stroke, percutaneous intervention for peripheral arterial disease (PAD), and minimally invasive treatment of venous disease and dialysis access. As such he and his team have access to the latest devices and technology available in these areas. One example includes the