Back in 1980, Nancy Kelley, a mother of three young daughters, was a student at Manchester Community College in Connecticut. She could sense that some faculty members and students were judging her as “a teenage mother who would never become anything”, she says. So she set out to prove them wrong. (see CV)

Kelley excelled at national politics, intellectual-property law and business, a combination that helped her to launch a career in scientific real estate. She graduated from the college as the valedictorian of her class in two years and won a Truman Scholarship funded by Congress. She became the first community-college student to transfer to Yale College, and was accepted on to a joint graduate programme at Harvard Law School and the John F. Kennedy School of Government. This led Kelley to the White House, where she secured a position as a White House Fellow and a special assistant to the US Trade Representative.

During her stint at the White House, Kelley specialized in global trade negotiations and the protection of intellectual property. That experience helped her move into the scientific arena.

In the early 1990s, she joined the law firm Hale and Dorr in Boston as a corporate securities lawyer. There she helped to build management teams, oversee venture-capital negotiations, create R&D alliances and take some companies public.

After she left to build and finance some companies of her own — Spaulding & Slye and Colliers International — a commercial real-estate company approached her about starting its life-sciences practice. Kelley was initially wary. “I'd never been in real estate and had no interest in it,” she says. But when she signed on with Spaulding & Slye to help the company write its life-sciences business plan, she realized that there was a huge untapped market for a specialized kind of real estate — housing science.

She says that she was lured to Alexandria Real Estate Equities partly because she will have a chance to work at a company focused solely on building, owning and managing creative environments for science, including New York's recently announced East River Science Park.

Kelley says that the key to her climb from community college to real-estate mogul was keeping her priorities straight and taking chances. She focused first on her family. “I did as best I could as new opportunities presented themselves,” she says.