While working on animal models of infection in 2000, Dr. Nichols was presented with a challenge that would take her work in an entirely new and exciting direction.

A pediatrician who was treating kids with damaged lungs asked Dr. Nichols, “so you can make changes to these little dime-sized balls of cells you use in your research: can you do anything bigger than that? Or is that the limit of what you're capable of doing?”

This challenge started a process in Dr. Nichols’ and her team did the research of “finding a way to make a skeleton of a lung, a support structure that would support the cells of the lung.” Since then she has been developing techniques and methods “to actually grow tissue from just cells and a scaffold in culture”.

Her scientific enquiry pushed her to ask the big questions: “How do I make blood vessels form? Are there better ways to deliver factors that help cells grow at the places you need them to?” This challenge propelled her to her calling. Dr. Nichols' research in microbiology and immunology includes a focus on “lung defense” - bioengineering respiratory tissue to combat disease and engineering whole human lungs for clinical application.

“Walk around to your local grocery store or the museum and you will see at least one person dragging a little tank around with them because their lungs don’t work well, and they can’t breathe,” says Nichols. “You can lose an arm or a leg and survive. But if your lungs are damaged beyond repair, even with a transplant, you never get back your ability to breathe and function normally. That’s huge.”

The drive and passion Dr. Nichols exhibits started early in life. She spoke about an important lesson her mother taught her when she was a child. “If you clean a bathroom and that's your job, do it well. Somebody could come in and fall or run and slip on something or they could get sick because you didn't clean it. If you're doing that job, whatever it is, do it to the best of your ability,” Dr. Nichols said reflecting on her mother’s words.

Dr. Joan Nichols is an eminent scientist, researcher, professor and Associate Director of the Galveston National Laboratory at the University of Texas and Dean for Student Affairs at the graduate school. She is an award winning educator passionate about mentoring students in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) fields and has seen lots of changes since she received her degrees.

“I grew up being the only woman in my Masters’ program and the only woman in my Ph.D. program” Dr. Nichols remembers. “I started to realize that many women didn’t see science as a viable field because they didn’t get the opportunities. No one wants to be the only one of anything, no matter what it is.”

“Today,” Nichols says, “we have classes that are 50/50 male-female and break up into diversity after that. That’s what you really want to see.” While she points out that the areas of big scientific change are still male dominated, “it helps to have women astronauts, it helps to have women studying black holes,” she says. “It takes role models to make change. Women start thinking, you are doing that, and I can do that, too.”

Dr. Nichols is passionate about the work she does, even if she does not succeed in actually making a lung that can replace a damaged one. “It’s like science fiction. It’s so far out there, but it’s really important to try” she says. “You know you are going to fail but you also know you gave your best, and in that process, you learned things that can benefit society.”

And for Nichols’ work, failure can be a lot more important than succeeding. “You will always remember all of your failures. Digging yourself out of them and figuring out what you need to do to succeed will always make you better.”

An issue that truly worries her today is that some people don’t believe in the scientific process and even think that the data isn’t real and that scientists just make it up. “Never in my life have I lived in a time like this,” says Dr. Nichols. “I remember studying about scientists, about people like Marie Curie, people who gave their lives to learn something and make our world better, and today you’ve got people debunking all over the world.”

Like most people, she sometimes doesn’t want to get up in the morning and go to work. “But I always get up because, in my job, there’s a chance of making a difference in lots of people’s lives.” While she recognizes that everyone’s motivation is different, Dr. Nichols says “at the end of the day, everybody wants to do something that impacts people in a positive way.”

“I may not see the benefit of my research in my lifetime, but one of my students is going to carry it on,” says Nichols. She calls it “the scientific relay-race.” She takes her students as far as she can with what she knows and then hands off the baton to them. “They will eventually do it. And I had a part in that,” she says. ”It’s a continuum. We all have a part in the next big step. That’s the good thing about science.”

“I'm so excited every year when new students come in” says Nichols. “I love talking to them and saying, look, you can do anything you think you can do. And I know that because I’ve done everything I can think of and I’m not even done yet.” Dr. Nichols likes to tell her students that when her job is done, “I can go sit in my rocking chair and say, OK, now it’s your turn to take it as fast and as far as you can.”