Pathology Department
1948-2025
We are sorry to report the death on August 4, 2025, of Walker (Kip) Wharton, a good friend to our department and to many members of the Pathology research faculty. The cause was a fast-growing glioblastoma.
Kip was a staff member and later group leader in the Life Sciences Division at Los Alamos National Laboratories (LANL) from 1981 to 1995. During those years he was appointed Adjunct Associate Professor of Pathology, and in that role provided strong student support and research resources to our Macy Foundation-funded PhD program, the precursor to the current inter-departmental PhD program in biomedical sciences at UNM. He particularly helped the department to recruit Dr. Larry Sklar to a joint position of Professor of Pathology and Director of the National Flow Cytometry Resource at LANL. In 1996 he relocated to the Moffit Cancer Center at the University of Florida, joining his former PhD mentor, Jack Pledger, to help launch Moffit’s cancer research programs. He returned to New Mexico in 2001 to be closer to family and was recruited as Research Professor of Pathology to Dr. Cheryl Willman’s team studying the molecular biology of childhood leukemia. He retired in 2017.
Kip was a larger-than-life rambunctious personality with a fierce dedication to his research on cancer, to his wife Debbie and son Tyler and to his friends at UNM, especially Drs. Larry Sklar, I-Ming Chen and Jan Oliver. Debbie passed away exactly four weeks after losing her beloved Kip. A memorial at the UNM Alumni Chapel in September remembered them both with great affection.
