Nancy the Person, from Co-workers

When you talk with Nancy’s co-workers, you are struck by three things:  1) she was one of the smartest people any of them had ever known; 2) she had a fabulous sense of humor; and 3) she was genuinely nice.  A graduate of the first class of computer scientists to graduate from the University of California-Davis, Nancy went on to get a Master’s Degree in Computer Science from UCLA.

While at UCLA she spent a summer internship at TRW in Redondo Beach and was snapped up as a full-time employee immediately upon graduation.  Ed Mashman, who was a TRW project lead, says that working with Nancy was a pure joy.  “She was one of those people who you just pointed in the right direction and she made magic.  I didn’t have to do a thing.”

When after a ten year stint Nancy left TRW to be a software developer at ITG, a institutional brokerage company, a number of her TRW colleagues soon followed.  She quickly rose through the ranks at ITG to become the head of Software Development, helping the company to develop new products that helped to revolutionize the industry and resulted in taking the company public.  Dan Zamsky, an ITG colleague who worked closely with Nancy says “she was one of the hardest workers in a group of dedicated hard working employees.  No matter how early I went in, she was always there before me.”

Possibly one of the greatest tributes to the mark that Nancy made with her co-workers can be found not just in the measures of business success she achieved, but more importantly in the large number of former colleagues who have mobilized to find her.  Engineers and developers are used to solving big complicated problems and, like Nancy, they don’t intend to stop until they succeed.