Betty Irene Moore was born in Los Gatos, California. At the age of two, her father passed away and she and her mother joined Betty’s grandparents at their Los Gatos area fruit ranch. Betty attended Campbell Elementary School and Los Gatos High School, then went on to receive her BA in Journalism from San Jose College.

Betty worked for the U.S. Rubber Company in San Francisco until her marriage to Gordon in 1950. Soon after they were married, the young couple moved to Pasadena where Gordon attended graduate school at the California Institute of Technology. While in Pasadena, she worked briefly for Consolidated Engineering Corporation in advertising and public relations, then shortly after joined the Ford Foundation.

In September 2000, the couple established the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, which seeks to develop outcome-based projects that will improve the quality of life for future generations. The Foundation focuses

it work in three areas of interest to the Moore’s: environmental conservation, science, and the San Francisco Bay Area.

Passionate about improving the quality of health care, it was Betty’s vision and leadership that led the Foundation

to approve the 10-year Betty Irene Moore Nursing Initiative in 2003. The intended outcome of the Nursing Initiative is to improve patient safety and outcomes through nurse-led initiatives in acute care hospitals within the five San Francisco Bay Area counties: Alameda, Marin, San Francisco, San Mateo, and Santa Clara. Through her position as Trustee on the Foundation’s Board of Trustees, Betty continues to play an active role to ensure her vision for improved quality health care and patient safety is realized.

Betty served on the board of El Camino Hospital in Mountain View and volunteered at the Palo Alto Senior Day Care Center. Today, she is a member of the Governing Board of Filoli, a historic house and garden near Woodside, CA that is part of the National Trust for Historic Preservation and serves on its Fine Arts Committee.