Prior to arriving at UConn, Nichole was an Associate Research Scientist at the Molecular, Cellular & Developmental Biology Department at Yale University. Nichole received her PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Madison with Ken Raffa (Entomology) and Jo Handelsman (Microbiology) and did her postdoctoral research in the lab of Bruno Lemaitre at the EPFL in Lausanne, Switzerland. Her research has focused on characterization of the gut microbiota of insect hosts and study of their impacts on host physiology and susceptibility to disease.