All in the Family - and all at Iowa State
ChE’s Nicole Lorenzen is the latest (family) “franchise player” at ISU.
It wasn’t inevitable Cyclone volleyball star Nicole Lorenzen would come to Iowa State just because grandfather Donn was an academic all-conference football player for the Cyclones in 1954.
Or that father Jerry was a standout fullback here from 1979 to 1982. Or that cousin Lynne was a star of the ISU women’s basketball team 1987–1991. And little brother Tyler, a redshirt freshman on this year’s Cyclone football team? Just a fluke.
Or is it? Do the Lorenzens bleed cardinal and gold when they cut their fingers? Do they have a genetic predisposition to large red birds? Well, you could ask a geneticist—say, Nicole’s aunt, Dr. Lisa Lorenzen, director of industry relations in the office of the Vice Provost for Research at (who knew?) Iowa State. Whether it’s nature or nurture, you get the picture: Nicole Lorenzen could have gone to college somewhere else. And tomorrow, in some parallel universe, the sun will rise in the west.
“I would come to campus with my dad as a kid,” Nicole recalls. “And my Aunt Lisa was in college here when I was little, getting her PhD in genetics. She was my role model.”
As role model, Lisa Lorenzen would help her athletically and intellectually gifted niece with “all sorts of weird things,” in Nicole’s words. “When I was in 8th grade, I isolated DNA for my science fair project. She helped—but I understood what was going on.” (There’s nothing to the rumor that the DNA was Nicole’s—or that she identified a Cyclone chromosome.)
Throughout her career as a four-sport standout at Eddyville-Blakesburg High School in southeast Iowa, Nicole never took her eye off the ball, academically speaking, becoming class valedictorian and earning academic all-state honors. That focus determined the direction she would take even before enrolling at Iowa State.
“I declared for ChemE when I came in,” she says, “because I wanted to go into biomedical engineering. Iowa State didn’t have that, so my aunt helped me decide which would be the best major.”
While many student-athletes choose less demanding majors, Nicole exhibits the genes and the confidence to excel in both her sport and chosen career. It’s not always easy—she’s had to make up labs and take proctored midnight exams in hotels when the team was on the road. But the redshirt sophomore is an academic all-Big 12 first-team honoree and an ISU scholar-athlete award winner.
After Iowa State, Nicole is considering the graduate program in biomedical engineering at “that other school” in Iowa City—but only so she can come back to Ames to watch brother Tyler on the football field. And when she has kids of her own, will they come to Iowa State? She laughs and says, “That will be up to them!” (We suspect Aunt Lisa might offer a different opinion!)
