  Nancy Flournoy was born in Long Beach, California, on May 4, 1947. After
graduating from Polytechnic School in Pasadena in 1965, she earned a B.S.
(1969) and M.S. (1971) in biostatistics from UCLA. Between her bachelors and
masters degrees, she worked as a Statistician I for Regional Medical Programs
at UCLA. After receiving her master's degree, she spend three years at the
Southwest Laboratory for Education Research and Development in Seal Beach,
California. Flournoy joined the Seattle team pioneering bone marrow
transplantation in 1973. She moved with the transplant team into the newly
formed Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in 1975 as Director of Clinical
Statistics, where she supervised a group responsible for the design and
analysis of about 80 simultaneous clinical trials. To support the Clinical
Division, she supervised the development of an interdisciplinary shared data
software system. She recruited Leonard B. Hearne to create this database
management system in 1975 (and married him in 1978). While at the Cancer
Center, she was also at the University of Washington, where she received her
doctorate in biomathematics in 1982. She became the first female director of
the program in statistics at the National Science Foundation (NSF) in 1986. She
received service awards from the NSF in 1988 and the National Institute of
Statistical Science in 2006 for facilitating interdisciplinary research.
Flournoy joined the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at American
University in 1988. She moved as department chair to the University of Missouri
in 2002, where she became Curators' Distinguished Professor in 2012.
