Nusser majored in
botany at the
University of Wisconsin–Madison, where she graduated in 1980. After earning a master's degree in botany at
North Carolina State University in 1983, she switched to
Iowa State University for graduate study in statistics, earning a second master's degree in 1987 and completing her Ph.D. in 1990. Her dissertation,
Failure Time Analyses for Data Collected from Independent Groups of Correlated Individuals, was supervised by Kenneth J. Koehler. After working for
Procter & Gamble as a statistician, she became an assistant professor at Iowa State in 1992. She served as director of the Center for Survey Statistics and Methodology from 1992 to 2004 and 2007 to 2010, and became affiliated with the graduate programs in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology in 1994 and in Human Computer Interaction in 2004. She was promoted to full professor in 2003, and became vice president for research in 2014. ==Recognition==