Richard Paul Spencer ’51

Richard Paul Spencer ’51 died on March 14 at the Caleb Hitchcock Skilled Nursing facility in Bloomfield, Connecticut, of dementia and Parkinson’s disease. He was born in New York City, graduated from the Bronx High School of Science and concluded his premed program as a Phi Beta Kappa with one year at Dartmouth Medical School before obtaining his M.D. from the University of Southern California Medical School in 1954. In 1956, while in the U.S. Navy Medical Corps, he married Gwendolyn Williams. Very quickly they had a family of three daughters. That was followed by a master’s in 1958 and a Ph.D. in 1961 in biochemistry at Harvard. He then began an academic career of teaching, research and patient care. The first stop was Buffalo School of Medicine, followed by Yale University of Medicine before settling in a new department of nuclear medicine at the University of Connecticut School of Medicine as professor and chairman. He finally retired in 2006 after having more than 900 scientific publications and nine books. Dick is survived by Gwen and daughter Carolyn. Daughters Jennifer and Priscilla predeceased him.