The Nancy Stegman Fellowship is awarded annually to recruit an outstanding incoming doctoral student.

Nancy attended Midwood High School in Brooklyn, where she met her future husband, Emeritus Professor of Public Policy, Michael Allen Stegman. She attended Cornell University, majoring in English and earning a Bachelor of Science in human ecology in 1962. After a long-distance courtship between Cornell University and Brooklyn College, she and Michael embarked on a marriage of 48 years.

Nancy began her career as an English teacher at Darby Township Junior High while helping to pay for Michael’s graduate study at nearby University of Pennsylvania. Nancy and Michael moved to Chapel Hill in 1965 after Michael accepted a position on the faculty of the University of North Carolina. Shortly after arriving in Chapel Hill with a newborn daughter, Nancy enrolled as a part-time student in the graduate program in computer science at UNC, from which she earned a Master of Science in computer science in 1976. She was among the first women to hold such a degree at that time. She then began a more than two-decade career in computer technology as a contractor to and career employee of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences in Research Triangle Park, N.C., where, at her retirement in 2008, she held the position of chief information officer and chief of the computer technology branch.

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