[3] Dorothy Jeanne Morrow was born in Ottumwa, Iowa but grew up in Lincoln, Nebraska, Los Angeles, and Seattle.
She stayed on at Washington for a master's degree, and her interests shifted to more applied areas of mathematics after taking a course on actuarial science and statistics with Zygmunt Wilhelm Birnbaum there.
She disliked the cold atmosphere and remote faculty there, and returned to Bryn Mawr after a year, but continued working with Hotelling.
She finished a dissertation on mathematics related to Hotelling's T-squared distribution, but by then Hotelling had moved to North Carolina and the remaining Columbia faculty were unreceptive, so she never completed a Ph.D.[2] Morrow married Leon Gilford in 1950, moved back to Washington after her unsuccessful attempts to complete her doctorate, and began consulting for the government, at first at the Naval Medical Research Institute and soon afterwards at the Civil Aeronautics Administration, where she became chief of biometrics, performing statistical analysis on medical information of airplane pilots.
[2] At the invitation of Herbert Solomon, who had been a graduate student with her at Columbia, she moved to the Office of Naval Research (ONR) in 1955.
After Weyl's replacement, Fred Rigby, moved to Texas Tech, Gilford was promoted again, to director of mathematical sciences.