Judith Schwartzbaum

Judith Schwartzbaum, an epidemiologist whose research on the relationship between the immune system and early glioma (a form of brain cancer) development was groundbreaking, was as dedicated to and passionate about left wing, feminist politics, her many friends—who spanned generations—and ballet, which she practiced for over 40 years, as she was to her research and teaching. Dr. Schwartzbaum’s research group was the first to observe evidence of immune suppression within five years before glioma diagnosis; because there had been little information before this on long-term prediagnostic signs of primary brain tumors, she focused on the prediagnostic period with the goal of eventually preventing or inhibiting development of some of these tumors. Born in Alameda, California, in 1945, and raised in Los Angeles, she earned degrees in history at the University of California, Riverside, and Sussex University before shifting her focus to epidemiology, which she studied at UCLA, followed by a post-doc at the University of Washington. She taught at the University of North Carolina and the University of Tennessee before beginning, in 1991, a long, distinguished career at the Ohio State University, from which she retired in 2022. While maintaining her position in the College of Public Health at OSU, she was also a visiting researcher, from 2002 to 2012, at the Institute for Environmental Medicine at the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm. Predeceased by her mother, Bessie Levy Schwartzbaum, who died early in her childhood; her stepmother, Mary Richards; and her father, Harry Schwartzbaum, she is survived by her brother Eric Schwartzbaum, sister-in-law Catherine Jackson Schwartzbaum, and their children, Ethan and Daniel; her cousins Jean Melley, Michael and Sara Shapiro, and Maida Mechanic; and countless friends from every period of her life, many of whom considered her their best friend, many of whom she spoke to at least weekly for 50 or 60 years. In Columbus, Ohio, where she lived for 32 years (the last decade of them with Lucy, the rescue dog she adored), she had an extraordinarily wide and disparate group of friends—neighborhood friends, friends with whom she mostly talked politics, scientific colleagues with whom she’d become close, young activists who considered her their adoptive “lefty Jewish grandmother,” and a tight community of fellow dancers at the FluxFlow Dance Center, where she could be found at the barre six days a week (and before and after ballet class, took classes in many other dance forms, including modern, contemporary, and improv). Judith was a key part of numerous FluxFlow contemporary dance projects, performing on film and on stage. Although she had struggled with a seizure disorder since 2021, her death on November 2, at home, was sudden and unexpected. Brilliant, glamorous, hilarious, imperious, unfailingly generous, ferociously loyal, a teller of jokes both excellent and awful, a determined provocateur, a kind and loving friend, she will be deeply missed by the many, many people of whose lives she was a part.

Arrangements entrusted to SCHOEDINGER MIDTOWN.