James Nichols, PhD, medical director of Clinical Chemistry and Point-of-Care Testing at Vanderbilt University Medical Center (VUMC), has begun a two-year term as president of the Clinical and Laboratory Standards Institute (CLSI), the leading global nonprofit laboratory medicine standards development organization.
Conducted at the patient’s bedside rather than in the hospital’s medical laboratory, point-of-care testing can yield results almost immediately, thereby enabling health care providers to determine more quickly whether changes are needed in the patient care plan.
Nichols, professor of Pathology, Microbiology and Immunology at VUMC, has been a member of the CLSI board of directors since 2014. He has contributed, as an expert panelist and committee chairholder, to the development of CLSI standards and guidelines, including those involving point-of-care testing.
Board certified in both Clinical Chemistry and Toxicological Chemistry by the American Board of Clinical Chemistry, Nichols was elected to a two-year term as CLSI president-elect in 2022, prior to assuming the presidency.
“It has been an honor to serve on the organization’s board of directors,” he said in a CLSI announcement. “I look forward to working with all the CLSI members as president.”
A graduate of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where he earned his doctorate in Biochemistry in 1990, Nichols received postgraduate training in Clinical Chemistry at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota.
Before joining the Vanderbilt faculty in 2012, Nichols was associate director of Clinical Chemistry, director of Point-of-Care Testing, and associate professor of Pathology at Johns Hopkins University Medical Center, medical director of Clinical Chemistry for Baystate Health in Springfield, Massachusetts, and professor of Pathology at Tufts University School of Medicine.
His research interests include evidence-based medicine, information management, laboratory automation, point-of-care testing and toxicology.