Born April 19, 1947Glen Ridge, New JerseyDied March 16, 2025Burlington, VermontDetails of servicesA memorial celebration of Joanna’s life is being planned for this summer. In lieu of flowers or gifts, Joanna requested that donations be made to the Alport Syndrome Foundation, Doctors Without Border s or Planned Parenthood Burlington Health Center.Dr. Joanna S. Weinstock (née Smith) passed away at UVM Medical Center — long her school and workplace — peacefully and surrounded by her two children and their families. Those who had the pleasure of knowing Joanna knew she was happiest when active and engaged with the world: cultivating her garden, researching an ancestor’s genealogy or a medication that might help someone she knew, marching for social justice or corresponding with elected officials, creating art with her grandchildren and exploring cultures firsthand, both near and far.Joanna was born in Glen Ridge, NJ to Winton and Elsie Smith (née Cressingham), and was the eldest of their 4 children. She studied French, Latin, piano, and violin, and was a Girl Scout Ambassador, attending round-ups in Idaho, Trinidad and Tobago, and a summer in Norway.In her undergraduate years at Mount Holyoke College and then at New York University, Joanna studied Russian language and history and continued her study of French. For the summer of 1967, she was a student behind the Iron Curtain, in the USSR and the Eastern Bloc. That July, at a youth hostel in Denmark, she met the love of her life, Henry Weinstock, who was leading a Bastille Day celebration of French songs around the campfire. They soon married in Joanna’s hometown of Montclair and spent the next half century traveling the world and sharing their deep love of life with friends, family, community, and everyone they encountered along the way. In the 1970s, they lived in Hudson Highlands, NY, where Henry was a French professor at Rockland Community College, Joanna completed her Masters of Library Science degree at SUNY/Albany and worked at local libraries, and they welcomed their 2 children, André (Jamie) and Kait.The family moved to Vermont in 1984, where 5 generations of Joanna’s family had lived. She had fond memories of time spent there as a youth, hiking Mount Mansfield and sailing on Lake Champlain.In 1988, while working as a medical librarian at UVM’s Dana Medical Library, Joanna became aware that the Title IX Act includes a prohibition against age discrimination for medical school applicants. This lit a spark in her to achieve her long-buried dream of becoming a doctor. With her customary determination and focus, she prepared for and was accepted into the UVM Medical School. After graduating in 1997 at the age of 50, she practiced family medicine in Alaska (Kotzebue, Anchorage and Juneau), Zuni Pueblo, NM and Isla Mujeres, Mexico. Across these locales, her practice encompassed the entire range of family medicine, from attending to difficult deliveries on life-flights above the Arctic Circle, to diagnosing and reporting the first case of hantavirus of 1999 in the US. Joanna also traveled to China several times to assist with adoptions and hiked to Machu Picchu as part of an emergency medicine training class.In Vermont, Joanna practiced at clinics across the Chittenden, Lamoille and Washington counties before retiring. She nonetheless remained engaged with medicine by reading medical journals, maintaining her medical license and fostering the next generation of doctors by interviewing UVM medical school applicants. One of her last wishes was to donate her temporal bone for medical research to help understand the hearing loss caused by Alport Syndrome, which is an inherited syndrome that affected her and continues to affect her family.Until just weeks before her death, Joanna was still eagerly studying medicine and corresponding with cousins found through her genealogy research. She remained extremely active by traveling with friends internationally, hiking with the “Mountain Mamas,” biking, skiing, dragon boating, paddling, gardening and singing with Mountain Song. She was also a member of the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship and volunteered for the local food shelf.Joanna was predeceased by her cherished Henry in 2021. She is survived by her 2 children and their families: Benjamin “Jamie” André Weinstock (Michelle Hewitt) of Somerville, MA and Katherine “Kait” Weinstock Armstrong (Kent) of Jericho and Winooski, VT and their 3 children, Scout (Portland, ME), Helen, and Patch. She is also survived by her three siblings: Polly Smith (New York, NY); Jeffrey Smith (Jolinda, Sanibel, FL); and Meredith Smith (Robin Carton, Somerville, MA) and many nephews, nieces, cousins and friends worldwide.Read the story on VTDigger here: Dr. Joanna S. Weinstock. ...read more read less