Nancy Nowak oral history interview, March 25, 2006

Nancy Nowak was born in Bridgeport, Connecticut in 1938. She attended Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania (B.A. in Biology, 1960) and Cornell University Medical College (B.S. in Nursing, 1963). In September 1963, Nowak joined the Peace Corps and traveled to Ethiopia as part of the Corps' medical team. Upon her return to the United States, she attended Johns Hopkins School of Public Health and Hygiene, where she received a Masters in Public Health. From 1967-1970 she worked for the Indian Health Service (part of the U.S. Public Health Service) in Washington, D.C. and then Anchorage, Alaska, and from 1971-1974, she was an instructor at the Arizona School of Nursing, before moving to Atlanta, GA. From 1980-1989 Nowak worked for the U.S. Public Health Service Regional Office in Family Planning. She then joined the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) as a program consultant in injury control, then program consultant for the their Division of Chronic Disease, studying breast and cervical cancer. She left Atlanta and the CDC in 2002. Nowak first became interested in the the Women's Movement in 1977, when she attended a meeting of the National Organization for Women (NOW). She went on to join the NOW board in 1978, and, along with Mary Jo Duncanson, co-led the ERA State Network which worked to build a means of support and dissemination of information throughout Georgia. She was also a member of the Homemakers for ERA. A longtime member of the Universalist Unitarian Congregation, she also served on the Board of Trustees of the Universalist Unitarian Service Committee, (a separate human rights organization) from 1997-2004.