College of Health

Dr. Nieto is a physician-epidemiologist with ample experience in epidemiology research and teaching. His main areas of research interest are survey research, epidemiologic methods, cardiovascular disease epidemiology, and epidemiology and health consequences of sleep disorders. Specific areas of research interest include the relationship between sleep breathing disorders and inadequate sleep on chronic diseases (including clinical and subclinical cardiovascular disease, cancer and mood disorders), as well as furthering our understanding of upstream determinants of health.
 
He was the founding director of the Survey of the Health of Wisconsin (SHOW) and is author or co-author of nearly 250 peer-reviewed papers and book chapters. He is co-author with of “Epidemiology Beyond the Basics,” an epidemiology textbook widely used in graduate epidemiology programs worldwide. Dr. Nieto trained as an MD in Valencia, Spain, and completed a residency in Family and Community Medicine in Segovia, Spain; a Master of Public Health in Havana, Cuba; and a PhD in Epidemiology at Johns Hopkins. He started his research career at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, where he was tenure-track faculty in the Department of Epidemiology for 10 years. In 2002, he became the inaugural Helfaer Professor of Public Health and chair of the Department of Population Health Sciences at University of Wisconsin — Madison. He joined Oregon State University in Fall 2016 to become professor and dean of the College of Public Health and Human Sciences, until his retirement in January 2022.