First veterinary class: Don Nichols combines math aptitude, animal interest for career in pathology
Don Nichols was the only math major to enter the first class of students at the Virginia-Maryland College of Veterinary Medicine.
Four decades later, Nichols’ math includes more than 30 years working for the federal government, a 40-year marriage to a classmate in the first veterinary college class, and a difficult-to-count number of animals on more than 100 acres in Northern Virginia.
“We’re two veterinarians and neither of us wants to tell the other that we have enough animals,” Nichols said. “So we've got some typical ‘farm animals’ such as sheep and cattle, as well as some goats, chickens, and pigs. And my wife's got some horses and some emus. We also have several rescued dogs. My wife is into birds, so she’s got various parrots, finches, pigeons, and geese. I've got pet snakes, tortoises, lizards, frogs, and salamanders. Not enough for you? I started keeping honeybees nine years ago and now manage 11 hives of them.”
Nichols’ wife is Valerie Campbell, who along with fellow 1984 veterinary college alumna Nancy Hall started Blue Ridge Veterinary Associates in Purcellville in the late 1980s, which is today a thriving 24-hour, 7-day-a-week veterinary practice. Nichols met Campbell and Hall on his first day of classes at the new veterinary college in 1980, joining the two women when students were asked to break up into groups of three for labs.
The three remained lab partners much of the first year. Nichols soon started dating Campbell, and they were married one week before the veterinary college’s first commencement in June 1984.
“I remember the first day quite well, because I was nervous,” Nichols recalled. “I didn’t know anybody. I went to the University of Virginia, which is not exactly known for producing veterinary students, they didn’t have a pre-veterinary program. Most the students in my class had done undergrad at either Virginia Tech or the University of Maryland.”
Veterinary college set Nichols on the path to a pathology career with the federal government, including lengthy stints at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland; the National Zoo in Washington, D.C.; and the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) which is located on Fort Detrick in Frederick, Maryland..
As a civilian pathologist working with the Army, Nichols spent the last 14 ½ years of his career before retirement frequently wearing protection suits while working with highly dangerous diseases such as anthrax, plague, and the hemorrhagic fevers caused by the Ebola and Marburg viruses.
Nichols sees pathology as where his aptitude for math and interest in animals met.
“All my life, I've liked puzzles,” Nichols said. “I like to solve puzzles. When I grew up out here in Loudoun County, I grew up in the town of Purcellville. This was a very rural area then. We had a few towns in the county and it was all farmland outside of that. And so I always had a lot of interest in animals, I spent my childhood wandering around catching frogs, minnows, and crayfish and that kind of stuff. But I was always really good at math. That's just the way my mind works.”
Nichols was just three hours short of a double major in biology while taking pre-medical courses at UVA. But his longtime interest in animals, plus summers working in veterinary clinics, spurred his interest in pursuing veterinary studies.
“The rumor back then was there was going to be this veterinary school, in partnership with the state of Maryland,” Nichols said. “In the history of Virginia and Maryland, we don't necessarily cooperate a lot. But it came off, and just in the right time for me.”
