Mary Beth Terry, PhD, a professor of epidemiology and environmental sciences at Columbia University, is a leader of the registry today. “She was the most thoughtful collaborator — she cared deeply about every methodological issue,” Terry said.
“A lot of people wanted to emulate how she lived her life, because she was always trying to learn something new and she never talked down to people. Even if you were her junior, she wanted to learn from you just as much as you were learning from her,” Terry added.
A love for hiking
Short in stature and physically fit, Whittemore could be seen walking and biking around campus and in the surrounding community. For many years, she and Keller spent September hiking in France, covering upward of 15 miles a day and ending with dinner and wine. Friends and family emphasized that they did this with backpacks containing not much more than a change of clothes and a book. “The stories, about the thunderstorms, and the food’s running out!” her daughter Gayle Whittemore recalled.
The pair were in New York on sabbatical in 2012 when Hurricane Sandy hit. The subway stopped running, but Whittemore wasn’t deterred. For multiple days, she walked about 8 miles from her lodging near 14th Street to Columbia University’s school of public health at 168th Street. In the afternoon she walked back to lower Manhattan with a headlamp, because the sun was setting early and the power was out.
The family spent summers at their second home in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. Keller had a summer position at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, and Whittemore worked remotely, including from the public library. Children and, eventually, grandchildren joined them for vacation. In winters, the family skied together. Whittemore stopped skiing in her 80s, only after another skier ran into her and broke her leg.
“She raised the whole family, including all of her grandkids, to be avid and competitive card players,” Gayle Whittemore said. Alice Whittemore loved any kind of card game: solitaire, including variations with multiple players; gin rummy; and five hundred. She enjoyed playing cards until a few weeks before she died.
Whittemore was a wonderful mother, Gayle Whittemore said. “She always had my back. When I was in high school, I was very embarrassed and not comfortable even talking about it, but my mother asked, and I said, ‘Yes, I’m gay.’ She proceeded to say it to every colleague and friend, proudly.” In the early 1990s, Whittemore refused to speak at a conference in Colorado because the state was hostile to gay rights.
Whittemore and Keller eventually married in 2016, after Keller was diagnosed with a recurrence of kidney cancer. He died a few months later at 93.
Alice Whittemore and Joseph Keller married in 2016. Photo by Gayle Whittemore
Above all, Whittemore loved to work. “My mother was never without a pad and a pencil, and she would write down pages of mathematical equations — no moment was wasted,” Gayle Whittemore said.
Whittemore’s many awards include the NIH Robert S. Gordon III Award in Epidemiology, the NCI 6th Annual Rosalind E. Franklin Award for Women in Science and the Janet L. Norwood Award for Outstanding Achievement by a Woman in the Statistical Sciences. She was inducted into the Institute of Medicine at the National Academy of Sciences in 1994.
Whittemore is survived by her daughters, Margot Palermo of Brookhaven, New York, and Gayle Whittemore of Rancho Mirage, California; stepchildren Sarah Keller and Jeffrey Keller; eight grandchildren; and her sister, Mary Segers Travers.
A memorial service will be held this summer in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, where she will be buried alongside Keller.
The Department of Epidemiology and Public Health is planning a symposium in Whittemore’s honor for May 11, featuring Terry as the keynote speaker, a panel of Whittemore’s former students and presentations by some of her other colleagues.