Nikodem was born in 1940 in the former Czechoslovakia during World War II. She graduated from Charles University in 1962 with degrees in chemistry and biology. She escaped communism and moved to the United States in 1967 to join her husband, Zdenek Nikodem who was pursuing graduate studies at Princeton University. Nikodem earned her Ph.D. in biochemistry at Rutgers University in 1975. Her dissertation was titled, The isolation, purification, and characterization of mammalian cytochrome b. Walter W. Wainio was her doctoral advisor. She completed postdoctoral research at Princeton.
