Lucia Nicola was awarded a master degree in materials engineering from the University of Trento, Italy, in 1999.

She then moved to the Netherlands where she received a PhD in mathematics and physics, from the University of Groningen. After a two-year postdoctoral experience in the Engineering Division of Brown University, USA, she was appointed assistant professor at Delft University of Technology, the Netherlands, in 2006. She spent more than ten years in Delft, where she was promoted to Associate Professor in 2014 and to Full Professor and Chair of Computational Material Science in 2016. In 2015 she was awarded an ERC Consolidator Grant to build a multi-scale model to study metal friction and lubrication by accounting, for the first time, for all relevant phenomena occurring from the atomic to the macro-scale, and their interplay. Currently, she is a Full Professor in Metallurgy in the Department of Industrial Engineering.