Robert M. Quencer was born and raised in New Jersey, and in 1955, he entered Cornell University, graduating in 1959 with a BS degree. He was commissioned in the US Navy in June 1959, and his first duty station was in Kaohsiung, Taiwan, where he served as part of the Military Assistance Advisory Group to the Southern Taiwan Command. Following that tour of duty, he was assigned to the Headquarters of the Commandant of the Third Naval District in New York City.
At the completion of the 2-year military obligation, Dr. Quencer returned to Cornell University to pursue studies toward an MS degree, with the intent of subsequently obtaining a PhD in biochemistry. After 1 year in graduate school, his professional goals changed and he sought admission to medical school following completion of his MS degree. The MS degree was awarded in June 1963, with the defense of his thesis on the “The Kinetics Autoxidation of Methyl Linoleate: The Effect of Added Antioxidants and a New Method for the Evaluation of Antioxidants” (and the publication of his first peer-reviewed paper in the Journal of the American Oil Chemists’ Society in 1964).
Dr. Quencer entered the Upstate Medical School (Syracuse) in September 1963, was elected to Alpha Omega Alpha, and graduated with an MD degree in 1967. He originally intended to pursue a career in surgery; however, after spending 1 summer as a surgical and medical extern at a University of Colorado–affiliated hospital, it quickly became clear to him that radiology was the dominant specialty in determining diagnoses and in guiding subsequent patient management. With this realization, he applied for a residency in radiology (encompassing both diagnostic radiology and radiation therapy) and was accepted for a position at the Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center. Following an internship year in internal medicine at Jackson Memorial Hospital (Miami), he returned to New York City, where he completed his residency at Columbia and a National Institutes of Health (NIH)–sponsored fellowship in neuroradiology at the Neurologic Institute of New York (NI). As a resident, he published his first paper in a radiology journal—“Perforated Ureter Secondary to a Ureteral Calculus” (Radiology 1972;102:561–62). As a fellow in neuroradiology, he was influenced greatly by the faculty at NI—Drs. Ernest Wood, Sadek Hilal, Michael Tenner, and Robert Waldron—and determined to pursue a career in academic neuroradiology. During his radiology residency and neuroradiology fellowship, he and Dr. Tenner assembled a large exhibit entitled “Angiographic Localization of Mass Lesions Within and Adjacent to the Third Ventricle,” which was his first original work in neuroradiology. It was presented at 3 national meetings, including that of the American Roentgen Ray Society in September 1971.
In 1972, Dr. Quencer joined the faculty at Downstate Medical Center (Brooklyn) as a member of the neuroradiology section, and during his 4 years on the faculty there, he published (as either first author or as coauthor) a number of papers on a variety of neuroradiology subjects, including venous abnormalities of congenital lesions, pediatric skull fractures, percutaneous spinal cord punctures, myelocystography, jugular venography, angiography of normal and abnormal ocular circulation, and the postoperative myelogram. In 1976, he left New York to become Chief of the Neuroradiology Section at the University of Miami/Jackson Memorial Medical Center; and in 1979, he was promoted to the rank of Professor of Radiology, Neurologic Surgery, and Ophthalmology. When MR imaging became an accepted clinical tool, he became Chief of the Section of MR Imaging in 1984, and then in 1992, he was chosen as the Chair of the Department of Radiology at the University of Miami and Chief of Radiology Services at Jackson Memorial Hospital.
During his 30 years at the University of Miami, Dr. Quencer, along with his colleagues, has published more than 200 peer-reviewed papers on a wide range of topics in neuroradiology. He has authored/coauthored 18 scientific exhibits and 26 book chapters/books and has been the principal investigator of a section on an NIH-sponsored program project on the imaging/histology of spinal cord injury. He has been a visiting professor at more than 40 institutions worldwide and has given the annual lectureship in honor of notables in the field of neuroradiology, including those named for Drs. Kricheff, Newton, Heinz, and Scatliff. Among his published works, he considers his most meaningful to be those which have dealt with the postoperative spine, acute spinal cord trauma, sequelae of chronic spinal injuries, intraoperative cranial and spinal neurosonography, motion-suppression techniques in MR imaging, evaluation of CSF flow dynamics on MR imaging, and normal white matter maturation by CT/histology in a primate animal model. In 1990, he was inducted as a Fellow of the American College of Radiology, and in 1995, he was the recipient of the First Chair in Radiology at the University of Miami—The Robert Shapiro Professor of Radiology. He has also served as an NIH advisory consultant and has been a member of special NIH review committees on a number of grant proposals.
In 1995, he served as President of the American Society of Neuroradiology (ASNR) and, during that year, helped to guide the process toward meaningful qualifications needed to become American Board of Radiology-eligible for the Certificate of Adequate Qualifications. During the annual ASNR meeting that year, he had the pleasure of presenting to Drs. Taveras and Newton the first Gold Medals given by the Society. In 1998, the Society selected him to become Editor-in-Chief of the American Journal of Neuroradiology (AJNR), and he served in that position until December 2005. With that 8-year period as Editor-in-Chief, plus the time served as Associate/Deputy Editor (first under Dr. Taveras and then under Dr. Huckman), he had a major hand in the development of the Journal over a 21-year period. In 2006, Dr. Grossman named Dr. Quencer as an Editor Emeritus of the AJNR. For the past 3 years, Dr. Quencer has served as the Radiological Society of America (RSNA) Subcommittee Chair for Neuroradiology, and beginning in 2008, he will become the Scientific Program Chairman for the RSNA.
Dr. Quencer's wife, Christine, a graduate of the University of Wisconsin, worked as a physical therapist at both Massachusetts General Hospital and Roosevelt Hospital in New York City. Later she trained as a diagnostic medical sonographer and worked at the Downstate Medical Center and at Jackson Memorial Hospital. She has also earned an MS degree in epidemiology at the University of Miami. They have 2 sons, Kevin (who is a third-year law student at Washington and Lee University) and Keith (who is a fourth-year medical student at the University of Florida).
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