Cheryl Fluty has had a colorful, highly varied career. She has always said, "If ever I write my autobiography, I plan to call it Never a Dull Moment!"

Her father was a career Air Force officer, so she grew up moving all over the country. Although the family was never stationed overseas, Cheryl has made up for that in the intervening years by extensive travel in the U.S., Mexico, Canada, Alaska, Europe and the Middle East. She spent six months at Stanford's foreign campus in Florence, Italy. She also enjoyed the dubious distinction of being present in Iran during its revolution in 1978-79 and was on the first planeload evacuated out after the fighting.

"People who stayed through the end," she says, "were pretty plucky people. The timid souls had all left months ago. Most of our friends used humor to deal with the stress of being shot at. I remember laughing my head off all through the revolution! On the plane out, we had whatever members of the international press were able to scramble aboard. In the seat behind us were a reporter and cameraman from CBS news. They filmed us singing a rendition of 'Ayatollah's Comin' to Town', a song I had written to the tune of 'Santa Claus is Comin' to Town'."

Cheryl earned a B.A. in Psychology at Stanford University; did the work for a PhD in Psychopharmacology and a Master's in Pharmacology at Indiana University; and earned an MBA in International Management at Golden Gate University. She taught 6th grade in a rural community in California right after her undergraduate degree, and taught 4th grade in Iran until civil unrest closed the schools down. After grad school, she worked as a civilian therapist for the Dept. of the Army at Ft. Ord in California, first as a drug abuse counsellor to returning Viet Nam vets, then doing hospital social work and finally at the outpatient mental health clinic. In each of these organizations, she created new programs, starting with a test and recommended therapy for drug flashbacks, which were a problem among new recruits; then she earned an Army Commendation for her work in the prevention and treatment of child abuse; created a Headache Clinic for people whose headaches were not resolved by traditional medical treatment; created a Biofeedback Clinic, administered a Neuropsychiatric Test Battery, and practiced Masters and Johnson style sex therapy at the outpatient clinic.

After her tenure in Iran, she decided to go into business in a technology-based industry. During the Iranian Revolution, she had sat on the balcony, listening to the sound of gunfire and thinking to herself, "How did I get here?" The answer was, "technology transfer." She had realized that what maintained America's premier position in the world was its technological strength, which relied on knowledge and continuing research. She decided that was the place to be. Given her educational background, the pharmaceutical industry made sense. So she started business school and found a job as a Drug Development Project Manager for Syntex, a research-intensive pharmaceutical firm near her alma mater, Stanford. Syntex is primarily famous for having invented the birth control pill and later, naproxen, better known today in its over-the-counter form as Aleve, a drug she helped put on the market.

After 15 years at Syntex, the company was acquired by Swiss firm Roche, which laid off most of the Palo Alto staff. Cheryl did independent consulting in project management and project information systems in the Bay Area for several years. Then she moved to the Sacramento area and opened her own business doing web sites and database design. She wrote a high-tech advice column for the Sacramento Bee (under her married name, Cheryl Leff) for 4 1/2 years, then for Prosper Magazine for another three years. She has also written several screen plays, as well as three full-length musical stage plays performed at regional Mensa gatherings. In 1994-95, she was VP of Communications and editor of the newsle