Nicole grew up in Wilmington, Delaware and attended Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia to earn her BSc in Biology in 2012. She then joined the lab of Dr. Anna Dornhaus at the University of Arizona to study social insect division of labor. Her PhD thesis work specifically focused on how ant workers differ in their sensory systems and how these differences drive worker task specialization. As a postdoc in the Ben-Shahar lab, Nicole now studies Drosophila as a model to understand how gene function and neuronal circuitry drive sex-specific behavior, such as male courtship. She is also helping to develop new genetic tools for manipulating neuronal activity in bumblebees using CRISPR/Cas9 technology.