She received a bachelor’s of science in mathematics from Marymount Manhattan College in 1958. That same year she married and quickly had two daughters. The couple divorced soon afterward.

Whittemore earned a master’s degree in mathematics from Hunter College of the City University of New York in 1964, then followed it with a 1967 PhD in mathematics at CUNY. In 1967, she began teaching math at Hunter College, where she was eventually promoted to professor.

But while she taught and carried out research in pure math, she was concerned that her work was too esoteric. She took a step toward real-world applications by teaching statistics, then accepted a postdoctoral position in epidemiology at the New York University Medical Center, where she had regular meetings with Joseph Keller, an applied mathematician.

Keller and Whittemore fell in love and, in 1976, left for Stanford University together, along with Whittemore’s younger daughter, Gayle Whittemore, and Keller’s son, Jeffrey Keller.

Whittemore started as a senior research scientist in statistics. In 1979 she joined the Stanford School of Medicine as a professor of family, community and preventive medicine. In 1987 she became a professor of epidemiology and biostatistics in the Department of Health Research and Policy, and from 1997 to 2001 she was the chief of its epidemiology division. From 2003 to 2005 she served as co-chair, then chair of the department. She retired in 2018 at 81.

“I had so much respect for her,” said Melissa Bondy, PhD, the Stanford Medicine Discovery Professor and a professor of epidemiology and population health. Although Whittemore retired before Bondy arrived, the two knew each other through professional societies. They became friends, with regular lunch dates.

“We called a lot of epidemiology — before molecular and multi-omic additions to our research — ‘black box epidemiology,’ and I think she was able to open up that black box,” Bondy said. “Because she was such a strong mathematician, she was able to untangle some of those questions.”

Cancer risk math

Whittemore developed methods required to take population-level findings and work out what that means to individuals. She explained to an interviewer in 2015: “What we want to do is put people into different strata. Saying [to one person] you’re at very low risk, you don’t need mammograms. But [to another person] your family history and your genetics suggest you’re at very high risk, so you need mammograms and you need maybe even more intensive screening to get your breast cancer early or prevent it entirely.”

Whittemore was one of the original investigators for the Breast Cancer Family Registry, a large international project funded by the National Cancer Institute. The registry was developed to understand both inherited risk of breast cancer and other risks. Whittemore helped design the registry, creating the plan to sample both people in families with a high risk of breast cancer and people without that family risk.

Colleagues describe Whittemore as kind, welcoming and curious.

Allison Kurian, MD, a professor of oncology and of epidemiology and population health, arrived at Stanford Medicine in 2002 for her postdoctoral studies. Whittemore welcomed her into her research group and enthusiastically introduced her to other group members as someone who would bring a clinical point of view.

“She was incredibly gracious,” Kurian said. “She was a wonderful role model in addition to being a brilliant scientist.” Later, they worked together on the breast cancer registry.

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.

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.