We Are EPH: Meet Alice Whittemore

This installment of We Are EPH focuses on Alice Whittemore, Professor Emerita, Epidemiology and Population Health. Alice Whittemore will be honored on May 16, 2024, during a lecture hosted by Stanford Department of Epidemiology and Population Health and Stanford Cancer Institute. Learn more about Dr. Whittemore below.

Alice Whittemore, PhD, has dedicated her career to understanding cancers' genetic and environmental mechanisms by integrating mathematics and biology. Her research focuses on statistical methods for epidemiological studies of site-specific cancers, particularly cancers of the prostate, breast, ovaries, and skin.

Dr. Whittemore earned a B.S. in mathematics from Marymount Manhattan College, followed by an MA  in Mathematics from Hunter College and a PhD in Mathematics from The City University in New York. She accepted a position as professor of math at Hunter College, doing research in pure mathematics. But she became concerned that her research was too esoteric, and so grabbed the chance to teach in a new CUNY statistics program even though she had never studied statistics. She said she taught herself by reading the course text “three pages ahead of the class,” doing the book’s exercises and then assigning them to the students.

“I never wanted to teach calculus again; I never wanted to do pure mathematics again," Whittemore said. "About that time, I was divorced, a single mother, and each summer I’d put my two young daughters in camp while I attended programs in applied math, economics and operations research. At one of those programs, I learned of a two-year fellowship program allowing pure mathematicians an introduction to applied problems by transplanting them from academic institutions to applied settings, and where they could be confronted with applied problems. Here pure mathematicians could do something useful for a change! So I decided to apply and I was accepted into this program – in fact I think I was the first such transplant.”

Through the program, Whittemore started a fellowship in the Department of Environmental Medicine at NYU Medical Center. There, Joe Keller, a world-famous applied mathematician working at NYU’s Courant Institute, was assigned to oversee Whittemore’s work. Their mutual love of equations, Chinese food and the outdoors eventually led to their marriage, lasting until his death in 2016.

Upon the completion of her two-year fellowship, Whittemore and Keller both took sabbatical leaves at Stanford University. Loving the academic and physical environment here, they pondered staying, but while the math department was eager to poach Joe, she recalls, “nobody knew quite what to do with me.” Even though she was a tenured professor at Hunter, she accepted an adjunct position at Stanford, working as a biostatistical collaborator of epidemiologist Ralph Paffenbarger. But other institutions were taking note of her work; after an invited talk at Harvard, she was offered a tenured professorship. At the urging of the provost, this led Stanford’s School of Medicine to “take a chance” and offer the same. She joined the faculty in 1978 as a Professor of Epidemiology and Biostatistics.

“Moving from pure mathematics into biostatistics and epidemiology was not a small, smooth transition—it was a huge leap. But it felt so right, and that’s taught me that it’s important not to be afraid to make major career changes. And I never regret for a minute the math education I received, because it’s so conducive to rigorous thinking.”

Her career in cancer epidemiology started with a friendship with a cancer epidemiologist with whom she applied for five NIH grants. The bad news was that they got them all, resulting in programmers sitting on the floor with computers because of a lack of chairs and desks (the pre-laptop area). It was also at this time that she discovered genetic epidemiology, which followed probability rules that she loved.

“The realization that genetic epidemiology was right for me was so mind-blowing that I had to stop working, leave the library, and take a walk around the block for a while just to mull it all over,” she said.

Dr. Whittemore has published extensively on statistical methods for the design and analysis of epidemiologic studies of prostate, ovary, breast, and skin cancers. Later in her career, her research focused on the genetic epidemiology of cancer, analysis of large-scale genetics data, and quality control procedures for whole exome sequencing studies. Whittemore says she is particularly proud of a paper showing a link between an informal method that geneticists used for the past century and formal statistical techniques because it allowed other investigators to extend the informal method in valuable ways. 

“Alice was a truly exceptional mentor, who could bring out the best in trainees from various disciplines through her kindness, open-mindedness and embodiment of the highest scientific standards,” said Julie Parsonnet, Professor of Epidemiology and Population Health. “Additionally, her respect for clinicians enabled high-impact collaborative research that advanced oncology practice.”

Whittemore has received numerous awards for her work, including the Janet Norwood Award for outstanding achievement by a woman in the statistical sciences, the Nathan Mantel Lifetime Achievement Award, the Florence Nightingale David Award from the Committee of Presidents of Statistical Societies, and the RA Fisher Lectureship in 2016.^[ She is an elected fellow of the National Academy of Medicine, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Statistical Association, and is a member of the American Epidemiological Society.

“Alice Whittemore’s work has impacted our field in a major way – and her work in genetic association using family data continues to inform my own research,” said Melissa Bondy, PhD, chair of Stanford Department of Epidemiology and Population Health. “I am lucky to count Alice as a friend and mentor, and we’re delighted to recognize her contribution not only to Stanford but to the fields of epidemiology and biostatistics. We are so fortunate to have learned from her firsthand.”

Looking back on her career, Alice observed, “Moving from pure mathematics into biostatistics and epidemiology was not a small, smooth transition—it was a huge leap. But it felt so right, and that’s taught me that it’s important not to be afraid to make major career changes. And I never regret for a minute the math education I received, because it’s so conducive to rigorous thinking.”

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Adapted in part from “An Interview with Alice Whittemore”, Stats & Data Science Views, 5/16/2017. (https://bit.ly/3xjYrX0)