Jeff adored his retirement years in Montana’s Bitterroot Valley, where he and his wife, Suzie, moved from Connecticut in 2005 after a highly successful career in surgery. “This is paradise,” he liked to say as he watched the sun slip behind the mountains. Jeff was a passionate outdoorsman, often fishing on the Bitterroot River. And it was there, in a shocking accident, that he drowned March 25, 2015, when his boat hit a sunken log and capsized. Two companions survived but Jeff was swept downriver.
Warmhearted, outgoing, and determined to live each day to its fullest, Jeff joined us from Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn. At Princeton, he majored in biology, wrote his thesis on tissue grafts, and roomed with Roger Eastlake and Bob Allen. Jeff joined the Glee Club and French Club and ate at Tower.
After earning a medical degree at NYU, he rose to lieutenant commander and head surgeon of a research team for organ transplantation at the Naval Medical Research Institute in Bethesda, Md. Then came surgical training back at NYU before he opened a private practice in reconstructive, cosmetic, and hand surgery.
The class shares its sorrow with Suzie; their children, Adam ’89 and wife Anne-Marie, Teddi and husband Miguel Cebrian, and Sheppard and fiancée Hillary Palmer; and granddaughters Olivia and Agatha Cebrian.