Adam Bass & Miriam Tepper
Adam was born in St. Louis and then moved to Maryland, in the Washington DC suburbs, when he was 2 years old, where he was soon joined by two younger brothers. He grew up in a relatively non-observant family who belonged to a Conservative Synagogue in Bethesda, Maryland, where Adam and his brothers all had their Bar Mitzvahs. He then travelled north, attending Amherst College, where he met his now wife, Miriam. After a year living in Boston, Adam moved south to attend medical school at Duke, while Miriam was studying medicine 8 miles down the road at the University of North Carolina. After getting married at the tail end of medical school, they headed back north to Boston where Adam did his clinical training first in internal medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital and then in medical oncology at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. Following that clinical training, Adam pursued laboratory research as a post-doctoral fellow and then joined the faculty at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. Following 10 years on faculty, Adam and family came down to NY, moving to Dobbs Ferry in 2021 when Adam was recruited to build a new research center at Columbia University. About a year-and-a-half there led to an about-face as Adam left and instead took on a new role at Novartis leading their oncology translational research program. In his new role, Adam makes frequent trips back to Boston, where most of his team is located.
Outside of work, Adam is lucky to have two sons, Samuel and Jonah, who are now 16 and 14 and are now in 10 th and 8 th grade in the Dobbs Ferry public schools. The boys have thrived in their new home in New York and have enjoyed their new community. Samuel had the distinct pleasure of having his Bar Mitzvah from his Boston-area dining room via a Zoom Bar Mitzvah during the pandemic, but Jonah was able to have his Bar Mitzvah celebration in person at GHC in December of 2022. Since coming to the New York area, despite arrival during a trying time in the still active but waning Covid days, Adam and his family have been fortunate to be welcomed into the GHC community. As a way to become more integrated into the community and to provide help to those less fortunate, Adam chose to take on the role of co-leading GHC’s SATO committee with Miriam. Together, they look forward to new opportunities to advance social action in partnership with the broader GHC community.
Miriam was born in Boston and grew up there and in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where her sister and parents still live. She graduated from Amherst College and the University of North Carolina School of Medicine. She and Adam got married at the end of medical school and then moved to Boston, where she completed residency training in psychiatry. Her clinical work has focused on adults with serious mental illnesses such as schizophrenia, with a particular focus on providing specialized services to young adults soon after onset of psychotic symptoms. Over time she moved into clinical leadership positions that allowed for innovation in care delivery, and also other roles that allowed her to work on approaches to providing care to underserved populations more broadly. Since moving from Boston to Dobbs Ferry in 2021, she has been working at the New York State Psychiatric Institute and Columbia University, where she is a leader of an initiative to improve access to mental health services among historically marginalized populations by expanding the mental health workforce by training lay providers to help meet clinical need.
More important than all of this paid work has been the incredibly good fortune of getting to be mother to sons Samuel and Jonah, who are now in 8th and 10th grades. Our favorite thing to do as a family is eat! In addition to getting to be with (and eat with!) her family, Miriam’s other favorite thing to do right now is to swim- she gets her money’s worth from her JCC membership. They feel so fortunate to have been welcomed so warmly into the GHC community after their move here. They feel very strongly about the importance of social justice as part of our Jewish identity and are enthusiastic about continuing to grow SATO activities within GHC.