JOINED THE DEPARTMENT

2023

BIO

Catherine Baker Nicholson grew up in Dallas, Texas. She earned her Bachelor of Arts in History at Rice University in 1982. While there, she won a national championship in the 800-meter run. Marriage to a career Naval officer followed. From the University of Texas School of Law (UT Law), she earned her Juris Doctor with Honors in 1985, where she worked on the Consumer Bankruptcy Project as a research assistant for now-Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts. She also collaborated with Senator Warren’s co-authors, Teresa Sullivan, President Emerita of the University of Virginia, and Professor Jay Westbrook, Benno C. Schmit Chair of Business Law at UT Law. After a short stint practicing law in Houston, then clerking for a bankruptcy judge in the Southern District of California, Catherine again worked on the Consumer Bankruptcy Project as a research attorney, investigating why people filed for bankruptcy. After her second child was born, she gave up the practice of law to raise and homeschool her four children while following her husband’s career from San Diego, California; Monterey, California; Yokosuka, Japan; Newport, Rhode Island; Chesapeake, Virginia; to Nebraska. She served as a caregiver to a son, who succumbed to brain cancer at age twenty-two in 2018. She then cared for her mother with Alzheimer’s until her passing in 2021. Catherine authored a book, Running in Borrowed Shoes, which Texas Christian University Press printed in the spring of 2024 about her father, Thane Baker, and his experiences in the 1952 Helsinki, Finland, Summer Olympics. She intends to focus her Ph.D. dissertation on women track and field athletes from the United States, Australia, and the Soviet Union during the 1952 and 1956 Olympic Games. Beginning each day with prayer, Catherine studies, writes, volunteers, and adores her children and grandchildren.