Charles Jules Henri Nicolle (21 September 1866 – 28 February 1936) was a French bacteriologist who received the Nobel Prize in Medicine for his identification of lice as the transmitter of epidemic typhus. Family Nicolle was born to Aline Louvrier and Eugène Nicolle in Rouen, France and was raised as part of a middle class family that valued education. He had two other siblings – his older brother, Maurice Nicolle (a medical microbiologist, professor at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, and Director of the Bacteriological Institute of Constantinople), and his younger brother, Marcel Nicolle (an art critic). Nicole later married Alice Avice in 1895, and had two children, Marcelle (b. 1896) and Pierre (b. 1898), both of whom also went on to enter the medical field. Studies and career The earliest educational influences on Nicolle were from his father, a doctor at a Rouen hospital. Nicolle later received his education from the Lycée Pierre Corneille in Rouen, followed by his medical degree from the Pasteur Institute of Paris in 1893. At this point he returned to Rouen, as a member of the Medical Faculty until 1896 and then as Director of the Bacteriological Laboratory from 1896 to 1902. Around this time, Nicolle also became deaf in one ear, which both limited his ability to continue clinical practice and simultaneously encouraged him to pursue academic research as an alternate career. He did just that in 1903, when he became Director of the Pasteur Institute in Tunis and conducted his Nobel Prize-winning work on typhus, bringing Hélène Sparrow with him as laboratory chief. He was still director of the Institute when he died in 1936. Directing the Pasteur Institute in Tunis Before Nicolle took on the position of leading the Pasteur Institute in Tunis, the Pasteur Institute in Paris remained the predominant center for research in France as it aimed to combine medical research, teaching, and public service (treatment of diseases) under Pastorian missionary principles. However, under Nicolle’s guidance over the next 33 years, the 'sister' Institute in Tunis quickly became an international center of its own for the production of vaccines used against infectious diseases and for medical research. Nicolle’s success in expanding the Pasteur Institute in Tunis lies primarily in his deviation from the traditional pastorian ideology that mandated that medical aid and research be done in a nonprofit manner. Nicolle instead actively sought to build relations with the local