Eleanor's father, Abraham Flexner (1866-1959), was a leader in several fields including, with his brother Simon Flexner at the Rockefeller Institute, the reform of early 20th-century medical education and medical research in the United States and Canada. Abraham founded and served as first director of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. His ideas for the structure and purpose of the institute so appealed to theoretical physicist Albert Einstein that Einstein chose it over competing university appointments when he emigrated from Germany to the United States in 1933.