Alice S. Whittemore

Alice Segers Whittemore (July 5, 1936 – December 2, 2025) was an American epidemiologist and biostatistician who studied the effects of genetics and lifestyle on cancer, following an earlier career as a pure mathematician studying group theory. She worked as a professor of health research and policy and of biomedical data science at Stanford University, and served as president of the International Biometric Society.

Education and career Whittemore was born on July 5, 1936.

She originally studied pure mathematics. She obtained a bachelor's degree in 1958 from Marymount Manhattan College, and a master's degree in 1964 from Hunter College. Whittemore completed a Ph.D. in 1967, from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York with a dissertation on Frattini subgroups supervised by Gilbert Baumslag.

As a professor of mathematics at Hunter College, she became interested in epidemiology and statistics. While teaching in Hunter College's new statistics program, she reportedly taught herself statistics by reading the textbook just a few pages ahead of her students, completing all the exercises herself before assigning them to the class. She pursued a fellowship to New York University to accomplish that shift of interests, under the mentorship of Joseph Keller. Keller and Whittemore married and moved together to Stanford in 1978. There Whittemore became a professor in the Department of Health Research and Policy. She was chief of epidemiology there from 1997 to 2001, and later became co-chair of the department. Keller died in 2016.

Whittemore died on December 2, 2025 in her home in Palm Desert, California, at the age of 89.

Awards and honors In 1992, Whittemore was elected as a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She was also a fellow of the American Statistical Association, and a member of the National Academy of Medicine.

In 2004, she won the Janet L. Norwood Award for outstanding achievement by a woman in the statistical sciences. In 2010, the Statistics in Epidemiology section of the American Statistical Association gave her their Nathan Mantel Lifetime Achievement Award. She was the recipient of the Committee of Presidents of Statistical Societies' Florence Nightingale David Award in 2005 and R. A. Fisher Lectureship in 2016 "for her fundamental contributions to biostatistics and epidemiology, covering a wide range of topics from environmental risk assessment to genetic linkage analysis, genetic association studies and cancer epidemiology; for bringing her statistical and mathematical insight to bear on the collection and interpretation of scientific data; for her leadership in large consortia of cancer studies; and for being a role model for many young scientists".

Whittemore also took part in the assessment of the risk prediction models of the disease.

Selected publications

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