Tessa Gardner, MD ’72
I am honored to be nominated for the HMS Alumni Council. Having benefited from an HMS education over 50 years ago, I still feel deeply connected to HMS. I am excited to provide input via the Council to strengthen connections between current students and alumni to each other and to HMS.
At HMS, I gained not only medical knowledge but the ability to develop creative responses to new medical situations. This has been invaluable as diseases, diagnostic and therapeutic tools, medical practice, and healthcare distribution have rapidly changed. Changes have been dramatically apparent to me in my field of infectious diseases, with the appearance, disappearance, and resurgence of new and old diseases, as well as the development of new vaccines and therapies.
My HMS experience was characterized by strong class cohesion, as we all shared the same lecture classes for two years, and most of us lived in Vanderbilt and ate in the (now gone) Vanderbilt dining room. I was a member of my HMS 50th Reunion committee, and classmates seamlessly reconnected with each other as if no time had elapsed. I believe that promoting class connectivity enhances long-term alumni connectivity with the institution.
I currently participate in the new Alumni-Student Mentoring Program, which paired me with a first-year HMS student who has provided me with insight into the current curriculum and residential and dining arrangements. I believe that feedback from students and young alumni could identify strengths and weaknesses, educational and social, in the current HMS program, and improvements could result in better long-term connectivity of young alumni with HMS. This is an area in which current alumni could be engaged.
I believe that strong alumni loyalty depends on creating meaningful connections with HMS during medical school and maintaining these connections after graduation. Strengthening advising and mentoring programs—before and after HMS graduation—could enhance student and alumni connections with HMS. These programs could include attention to students’ overall satisfaction while at HMS and include some follow-up contact after graduation.
Current alumni could also be engaged in more mentoring programs. In addition to the current advisory program, the development of new mentoring programs, such as “Area of Interest Mentoring” and “Geographic Mentoring,” could enhance the long-term connection of new graduates to HMS. As students’ interests evolve at HMS, they could be paired with interest mentors (included in an “HMS Link” listing faculty, staff, and alumni willing to offer career advice to current HMS students and graduates), and mentoring could be extended beyond graduation. As graduates start their residencies, they could be paired with geographic mentors (current alumni in the same cities).
I look forward to working with the Alumni Council and the HMS administration.
Tessa Gardner, MD ’72, is a clinical pediatric infectious diseases specialist, now in private practice in St. Louis. She received a BS in 1968 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, with a major in life sciences, after being one of about 50 women in the entering class of over 1,000 students. She graduated from MIT a semester early and worked in a genetics institute lab in Italy before beginning at Harvard Medical School in 1968, where she was one of 13 women in the entering class. After graduating from HMS in 1972, she did a pediatric internship and residency at Boston Children’s Hospital, followed by a clinical and research infectious diseases fellowship at the University of Chicago, where she worked on Epstein-Barr Virus. In 1978, after the fellowship, she joined the pediatric infectious diseases faculty of St. Louis Children’s Hospital as an assistant professor at Washington University School of Medicine, seeing patients and doing basic and clinical research on varicella-zoster virus. In 1984, she moved to Mercy Hospital in St. Louis. In this large community teaching hospital, she served as director of the Division of Pediatric Infectious Diseases for 15 years until 2000, seeing many infectious disease patients and participating in hospital infection control, quality assurance, pharmacy, and therapeutics and teaching residents, attending physicians, nursing, and other staff. Throughout her career, she has focused on clinical medicine, with particular interest in maternal-fetal and neonatal infections, herpes viruses, and Lyme disease. An HMS mentor, Jerry Klein, MD, asked her to write a comprehensive chapter on Lyme disease for the 1999 and 2001 editions of the Remington and Klein textbook Infectious Diseases of the Fetus and Newborn Infant. Her chapter, supporting the existence of congenital Lyme disease, was rediscovered 20 years later and led to her being asked to be a major participant in the 2022 Banbury Center Conference on Perinatal Transmission of Lyme Disease, which in turn led to renewed interest in investigating congenital Lyme disease. In 2000, she established her private practice, Pediatric Infectious Diseases Consultant PC (now LLC), seeing both in- and outpatients. In early 2020, just as she began to contemplate retirement, the COVID-19 pandemic began. She suddenly found herself called upon to urgently advise many non-profit organizations, such as preschools and religious institutions, in developing safe, creative, continuously evolving COVID-19 mitigation policies based on a growing, rapidly evolving body of data so that they could safely remain open.
She became interested in medicine at a young age, spending her childhood in Costa Rica, Ecuador, Sri Lanka, India, and Pakistan, where her botanist father did research for international organizations and saw many people suffering from tropical diseases. At HMS, she became interested in infectious diseases, inspired by seeing pediatric infectious diseases patients with Dr. Jerry Klein and spending time in Dr. John Enders’s Clinical Virology lab. She also spent an HMS summer elective working in a jungle hospital in Colombia, South America, where she saw patients with many infectious diseases. She has participated in HMS activities, most recently as a member of the Class of 1972 50th Reunion Committee and as a mentor in the HMS First Year Program on Aging. She is married to Morey Gardner, MD, an internal medicine infectious diseases specialist, whom she met in a hospital microbiology lab during their internships in Boston. They have four children—an academic PhD botanist, an academic neurologist (HMS MD ’08), the municipal attorney for a major city, and an attorney working for a political campaign—and 11 grandchildren. She is an artist, and many of her drawings of HMS classmates are included in the Class of 1972 yearbook.