Alumni Spotlight: Nancy (Gardiner) Mead (‘63, ‘67, ‘83)

Neither of Nancy Mead’s parents, Armenian immigrants, had completed high school. Her father earned a living as a photoengraver — an artistic career but not requiring higher education — and her mother worked in a pencil factory before marrying and having children. A stellar student, Nancy was determined nonetheless to attend college

That dream ultimately came to fruition; she earned a B.A. in mathematics and French (with honors) from NYU in 1963, thanks to a full-tuition scholarship — and advice from a family friend who was the only one in their orbit with a college degree.

She graduated, however, at a time when women math majors faced a limited number of options. “If you didn’t want to teach, maybe you could find work as an actuary, statistician, or math librarian,” she says. She was not really interested in any of those roles: with computer technology advancing steadily, Mead, who had earned money for her books and other expenses by working at a mitten factory — doing the calculations needed to meet often-complex wholesale supply demands — hoped instead for a programming job.

In an era well before monster.com and LinkedIn, she scanned the help-wanted ads in the newspaper and quickly realized there was a major hitch in that method: at the time, ads were separated by gender, and few would ever advertise a programming job in the section reserved for women. Once she had unlocked that secret, she found a job as a programmer at Chase Manhattan Bank and concurrently took evening classes at NYU, aiming to earn a master’s in mathematics. Combining full-time work, part-time study with a focus on applied mathematics, and an onerous commute was grueling, but worth it in the end: she received her master’s in 1967 — the year after she left Chase and began what would become a quarter-century tenure at IBM. (She made the move, she has explained, because while banks needed programmers, programming was not their core function, limiting how far up the corporate ladder you could go.)

While at IBM, she set her sights on earning a doctoral degree. She chose to attend what was then known as Brooklyn Poly (now NYU Tandon) because it was a smaller school where she could receive individual attention.

While students today can still attest to the individual attention they receive, much of Mead’s other experiences will sound wholly unfamiliar: initially, there was only one other woman student in the mathematics doctoral program, and the two, both working as teaching assistants, were forced to share a single desk (unlike the male teaching assistants who each had their own desks.) Adding insult to injury, there were women’s bathrooms only on every other floor of the old razor factory where classes were held, necessitating long trips either on slow-moving elevators or up and down flights of stairs. (That facility, now known as the Jacobs Academic Building, has since markedly improved, but her situation at the time was strongly reminiscent of that in the film Hidden Figures, which describes the plight of the female mathematicians working in NASA’s early space program.) Despite those hardships, Mead persevered and has especially fond memories of her advisor, Stanley Preiser, and role model, Lesley Sibner, who guided her as she earned her Ph.D. in 1983 with a thesis entitled "Complexity Measures for System Design."

Mead remained at IBM until 1990, earning the prestigious title of Senior Technical Staff Member, spearheading the development of numerous large real-time systems, managing the company’s Federal Systems’ software engineering education department, and other assignments. By the early 1990s, when IBM was seeking to restructure and offering buyouts, she was ready for new challenges. She very quickly landed at Carnegie Mellon's Software Engineering Institute (SEI), where she focused on developing educational curricula and cybersecurity. (She served as SEI’s Director of Software Education from 1991 to 1994 — not an especially large leap given her work with IBM’s Federal Systems.)

While Mead, who earned the title of SEI fellow in 2013, left the Institute five years later, it would be highly inaccurate to say she has retired. With a variety of experiences behind her — including teaching at numerous schools such as Johns Hopkins and the University of Maryland; and co-authoring two books, Software Security Engineering (2008) and Cyber Security Engineering (2016), as well as more than 150 papers — she finds herself in continual demand.

A Life Fellow of the IEEE, a Distinguished Member of the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM), a Lero Parnas Fellow, and the recipient of a Distinguished Education Award from the IEEE Computer Society’s Technical Community on Software Engineering, she gives presentations and sits on conference committees and juries for several professional organizations; she still teaches courses at Carnegie Mellon as well.

The laurels also continue to pour in: this past year, she garnered an IEEE Women in Services Computing Award. She may be, however, most proud of not an award she has received but one that bears her name: since 2010, the Nancy Mead Award for Excellence in Software Engineering Education has been given by the IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering Education and Training.

Her advice to others hoping to follow in her footsteps is to do work that you love and that you’re enthusiastic about. It’s great to have career goals, she says, but unrealistic to do so expecting an award. “If you do award-winning things, then it will happen,” she concludes.