Walter Nance

Walter Elmore Nance (1933 to 2021) was an American physician and geneticist who spent most of his career as professor and chair of the Department of Human Genetics at Virginia Commonwealth University. He was born in Manila and grew up in Shanghai, New Orleans and Oak Ridge, Tennessee. He took a mathematics degree at the University of the South, a medical degree at Harvard Medical School in 1958 and a doctorate in genetics at the University of Wisconsin in 1968. He taught at the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine from 1963 to 1969 and at the Indiana University School of Medicine from 1969 to 1975, and in 1975 he moved to Virginia Commonwealth University, where he remained until he retired. He became internationally known as an expert on hereditary deafness, twin studies and the genetic linkage analysis of both continuous and qualitative traits. The syndrome that now bears the name Nance-Horan was first described in 1974 by Margaret B. Horan and Nance. He died on 17 October 2021, aged 88, at Sewanee, Tennessee, where he had retired with his wife, Mayna Avent. The Wikipedia article is the source for this entry, which records what is known and is not medical advice.