Dr. Nicole De Nisco
- Associate Professor of Biological Sciences
- Fellow, Eugene McDermott Distinguished Professor
The McDermott Professorships were established in August 2017, funded by an anonymous gift, with the goal of providing early career support and recognition to faculty members who have established extraordinary records of research productivity, teaching excellence and university service, and who show promise of being leaders of the UT Dallas faculty in the future.
“The interdisciplinary research environment carefully cultivated by UT Dallas empowers my group to develop innovative, evidence-based solutions for women’s health at the intersection of microbiology, chemistry, biomedical engineering and clinical practice. I am grateful for UT Dallas’ continued support in my lifelong mission to advance the frontier of women’s health and alleviate the suffering of the millions of individuals with recurrent and chronic infections.”
Molecular biologist Dr. Nicole De Nisco has made significant strides toward understanding better the mechanisms underlying recurrent urinary tract infections (UTIs) and inflammation in postmenopausal women and in developing potential new therapies to treat or prevent infections.
Her research focuses on the dynamics of the urinary microbiome – the organisms that inhabit the urinary tract – and the complex interactions that occur between the host and pathogenic bacteria that invade to cause infection.
Through projects funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), De Nisco uses advanced imaging, mass spectrometry-based techniques and metagenomic analysis to shed light on the relationship between the urinary microbiota and the human host.
She has an ongoing collaboration with clinicians in the Department of Urology at UT Southwestern Medical Center to study the infections in postmenopausal women, in whom UTIs can recur so frequently that they become a chronic condition requiring daily doses of increasingly powerful antibiotics.
De Nisco and her colleagues have identified specific bacteria in the bladder that may indicate which postmenopausal women are more susceptible to recurrent UTIs, and they found that estrogen may play a role in reducing that susceptibility.
In collaboration with UT Dallas researchers in chemistry and biochemistry, De Nisco also is investigating the use of a novel cell-penetrating, light-activated theranostic dye – called BactVue – to identify and eradicate intracellular bacterial pathogens in the bladder that cause recurrent UTIs. This unique molecular probe can pass through host cell membranes, selectively bind the bacteria hiding inside, and, with the application of a specific wavelength of light, facilitate the targeted ablation of infected tissue.
De Nisco earned a Bachelor of Science in biology and a PhD in molecular biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Before joining the UTD faculty in 2018, she was an NIH Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Award postdoctoral fellow at UT Southwestern.