Dr. Judith Absalon ’90

Dr. Judith Absalon ’90 opened her first medical practice as a child growing up in Brooklyn, New York. Her office was in the bathroom of her home, and she played all the pertinent parts: receptionist, nurse, doctor.

“I was raised as an only child,” she explains, laughing.

A real passion and familiarity with the profession powered her pretend play; Absalon—who has spent her career working on infectious diseases, including helping develop the COVID-19 vaccine at Pfizer—has doctors in her family and traveled often to her parents’ native Haiti.

“I really got to see and had the capability to understand what happens when you don’t have… access to clean water…[or]… certain vaccines,” she says. “I was there [for a] typhoid epidemic.”

Absalon visited Wesleyan after learning about the university from a boss whose daughter had been admitted.

“It was totally my vibe,” she remembers. “I was like, ‘Anybody could fit in here.’ It just felt right.”

She was a math and pre-med major, and her experiences on campus “shaped me in ways that I would not have been able to predict,” she says. “Most of my life-long friends came from Wesleyan. Whenever I see people from Wes, there’s always love.”

Absalon, who went on to attend medical school at Stony Brook University and complete her residency and a fellowship at Columbia University, also says Wesleyan gave her the confidence to chart her own path. When the existing fellowships at Columbia didn’t match her aspirations, for instance, she made her own, completing a master of public health degree in the process.

“It was a grant that I wrote for myself,” she says. Wesleyan “shaped me in the sense that I do what I want to do. The fellowship wasn’t quite what I wanted…‘Let’s craft this, who can help me?’ I’m more open to different kinds of things because I grew up—college is where we grow up—in an environment where there are so many different things.”