Nancy R. Mead is an SEI alumni employee.

Nancy R. Mead is a fellow at the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) and an adjunct professor of software engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. She is currently involved in the study of security requirements engineering and the development of software assurance curricula. She also served as director of education for the SEI from 1991 to 1994. Her research interests are in the areas of software security and software requirements engineering.

Prior to joining the SEI, Mead 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.

Mead has authored more than 150 publications and invited presentations. She serves on the editorial boards for the International Journal of Systems and Software Security and Protection and the Requirements Engineering Journal and is a member the IEEE TCSE Executive Committee and the Open University Advisory Board. She is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE) and the IEEE Computer Society, and she is a Distinguished Educator of the Association of Computing Machinery. Mead received the 2015 Distinguished Education Award from the IEEE Computer Society Technical Council on Software Engineering, and in 2019 was named a Parnas Fellow at Lero, the Irish Software Research Centre.

Mead received her PhD in mathematics from the Polytechnic Institute of New York and received a BA and an MS in mathematics from New York University.