Nancy Mead started her education with a BA in mathematics and French from New York University. She went on to receive an MS in mathematics from New York University and her PhD in mathematics from the Polytechnic Institute of New York.

Nancy was a senior technical staff member at IBM Federal Systems, where she spent most of her career in the development and management of large real-time systems. She also worked in IBM's software engineering technology area and managed IBM Federal Systems' software engineering education department. She has developed and taught numerous courses on software engineering topics, both at universities and in professional education courses.

Nancy is the team leader for the Survivable Systems Engineering (SSE) team as well as a senior member of the technical staff in the Networked Systems Survivability Program at the Software Engineering Institute (SEI). The CERT¿ Coordination Center is a part of this program.

She is also a faculty member in the Master of Software Engineering and Master of Information Systems Management programs at Carnegie Mellon University. She is currently involved in the study of survivable systems engineering and the development of professional infrastructure for software engineers. She also served as director of education for the SEI from 1991 to 1994. Her research interests are in the areas of software requirements engineering, software architectures, software metrics, and real-time systems.

She has about 100 publications and invited presentations, and has a biographical citation in Who's Who in America. She is a senior member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers, Inc. (IEEE) and the IEEE Computer Society and is also a member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). Mead serves as Steering Committee Chair for the International Requirements Engineering (RE) Conference and is a member of Steering Committee for the Conference on Software Engineering Education and Training (CSEET) and numerous advisory boards.

In her spare time, Nancy enjoys cooking, tap dance, and golf. She and her husband Woody are planning to spend more time on the golf course.