By Jacquelynn D. Powers, Photographs: Francis George

n a city where the showgirl is synonymous with feminity, it's amazing to meet Heather Murren. Not only does she shatter every stereotype about what it means to be a woman in Sin City, but she also does so in the most elegant and chic manner. Murren, the co-founder, chairperson and CEO of the Nevada Cancer Institute, is one of the most tireless, devoted and industrious philanthropists in a town brimming with do-gooders (Andre Agassi, Larry Ruvo and Steve Wynn, to name a few). She is as together and composed as they come, almost steely in her determination. In four years, Heather has raised nearly $100 million to make the NVCI a reality.

Still, it's no surprise that Heather, 40, has been so successful in her quest to build Nevada's first official cancer institute, which launched one year ago. Prior to moving to Las Vegas, she was a top analyst on Wall Street; Murren ran the global consumer-products research effort for Merrill Lynch, specializing in cosmetics and household products. In 1998, her husband, Jim, also a leading analyst, relocated the family to pursue an opportunity as the executive vice president and CFO of MGM Mirage. (He has since been promoted to president of the corporation.) Heather continued her work on Wall Street for several years, commuting back and forth between New York and Las Vegas, until 2001, when she turned her attention to a more pressing matter: founding, financing and fulfilling the dream to launch the NVCI.

Heather had personal reasons to make that dream come to fruition: She had lost two grandparents to the disease. "Both my husband and I have a family history of cancer," she says. "When we moved here, we found that when people had a cancer experience, they would leave the state to be treated somewhere else. We had come from places where cancer treatment was some of the best you could ever find. How could it be possible that someone here doesn't have access to all of those things? This began to snowball into a dialogue with a number of people in the community: Wouldn't it be time and right to have a cancer-research institute to bridge that gap between research and the existing work of the community oncologists here?" Dr. John Murren, Jim's brother and an eminent lung-cancer specialist at the time, prodded the couple in the appropriate direction.

In April 2001, Heather quit her job at Merrill Lynch and started volunteering—her position today is still pro bono—out of her Summerlin home, in her "running clothes." Six months later, equipped with an assistant and an office at UNLV, the process was well under way. "John helped guide us in terms of our science and clinical activities," Murren remembers. "He was a bridge-builder. He enabled us to talk to leaders in the cancer community. He had much more credibility than we ever would with doctors and researchers." By 2003, the project was selected as the official cancer institute of Nevada. With more than 11,000 new cases of the disease diagnosed annually in the state, it was an easy designation to make. Now, they just needed to raise the money ...

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