JUDITH GRUBB TESMER March 29, 1940 – Oct. 14, 2022
Judith Grubb Tesmer, daughter of Henry Marion Grubb and Dorothy Irene McCampbell, died Oct. 14, 2022, at Westminster Village, West Lafayette IN after a long struggle with dementia. Judy was born in Chicago, IL on March 29, 1940, and attended Purdue University where she earned a B.S. in Microbiology in 1962.
She met her future husband, Joseph Ransdell Tesmer, in the Purdue Band where she played flute. She always said the first thing she noticed about the clarinetist was his long fingers. They were married in Highland, IN on June 23, 1962. From 1962-1970 she worked in the lab of renowned microbiologist J. T. Grayston at the University of Washington in Seattle.
After that, Judy and Joe moved the family back to West Lafayette, and then to Madison WI, before finally settling into the subdivision of White Rock in Los Alamos, NM. In 1979 Judy joined the Biosciences division at Los Alamos National Labs where she worked until she retired in 2001. Some of the notable projects she worked on included sequencing human chromosome 16 for the Human Genome Project as well as the genomes of several bacterial pathogens.
Judy loved her family, cats, gardening, quilting, crafting, and Scrabble, and her fierce bridge skills were rivaled only by her ability to dole out sore hands during holiday card games of “Hell”. Judy and Joe enjoyed hosting many parties for her friends, neighbors, and especially lab “orphans” stranded in town over the holidays.
In 2016, they relocated back to West Lafayette to be closer to family. We will miss sipping old-fashioneds with her, making piles of Christmas cookies from old family recipes, and her dry wit.
She is survived by her husband Joseph (83), currently a resident of Westminster Village, her sons Jeffrey Ransdell Tesmer (57) of Salinas, CA and John Joseph Grubb Tesmer (54) of West Lafayette, IN, her grandchildren Tim, Briana, Ashley, Alexander, Andrew, and Evelyn, and two *extremely* well-fed and coddled felines.
In lieu of flowers, please consider donations to either the Alzheimer’s Association (https://www.alz.org/) or the Westminster Village Foundation of West Lafayette (https://wvwl.org/foundation/).
A celebration of Judy’s life will be held in the future; contact John Tesmer (jtesmer@purdue.edu) if you are interested in participating.
