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Barbara Visscher
In Memoriam

Barbara Visscher

Professor Emerita of Epidemiology

UC Los Angeles
1927-2017
Barbara Ruth Visscher (Kahn) died peacefully on August 12, 2017. She grew up in the Prospect Park neighborhood of Minneapolis and attended Pratt School and Marshall High, University of Minnesota undergraduate and medical school where she received her M.D. She met Fredrick H. Kahn while doing her internship in San Francisco. They married in 1952 and in 1954 moved to West Los Angeles. Barbara earned an MPH and DrPH in Epidemiology from the UCLA School of Public Health where she went on to teach and do research until 2010.

Some of her areas of interest were: Infectious disease epidemiology; AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases; slow and latent viruses; neurologic disease epidemiology; and AIDS dementia. Outside of her professional life, she was a Girl Scout leader and den mother in the Mar Vista neighborhood and Sunday School teacher for the Unitarian-Universalist Society for many years. With her family, she hiked and Nordic skied in the California mountains, learned to sail with the family, and sailed with her daughters to Catalina Island. She spent her last years close to family in Minnesota. Barbara is survived by her three children, Susan, Kathryn and William, and her three grandchildren, Kevin and Laura Farr and Amelia Kahn, as well as extended family, friends, colleagues and students.

Steven Wallace