There were early signs that Nicole De Nisco ’07, PhD ’13 might become a scientist. She ran out of science classes to take in high school and fondly remembers the teacher that encouraged her to pursue science instead of the humanities. But she ended up at MIT, in part, out of spite.
“I applied because my guidance counselor told me I wouldn’t get in,” she says. The rest, as they say, is history for the first-generation college student from Los Angeles.
Now, she’s an assistant professor of biological sciences at the University of Texas at Dallas studying urinary tract infections (UTIs) and the urinary microbiome in postmenopausal women.
De Nisco has already made some important advancements in the field: She developed a new technique for visualizing bacteria in the bladder and used it to demonstrate that bacteria form reservoirs in human bladder tissue, leading to chronic or recurrent UTIs.
