Flood received an Master of Arts in mathematics at the University of Nebraska, and a Doctor of Philosophy at Princeton University in 1935 under the supervision of Joseph Wedderburn, for the dissertation Division by Non-singular Matric Polynomials.
In the 1930s he started working at Princeton University, and after the War he worked at the Rand Corporation, Columbia University, the University of Michigan and the University of California. In 1961, he was elected President of the Operations Research Society of America (Operations Research Society of America), and from 1962 to 1965 he served as Vice President of the Institute of Industrial Engineers.
In the 1950s Flood was one of the founding members of TIMS and its second President in 1955. End 1950s he was among the first members of the Society for General Systems Research.
