Dr. Robert Recker, head of Creighton University’s Osteoporosis Research Center, has come a long way since his days as a pupil in a one-room country school in rural Nebraska. And he owes much of his success, he says, to Creighton. He’s been at the Jesuit university for nearly all of his academic and professional career. “Recker appreciates the values here,” says Recker, one of the country’s top bone biology specialists and a former president of the American Society for Bone Mineral Research. “That’s a large part of the reason I’ve stayed, along with the opportunities I’ve had here, as well.”
Recker grew up on a hog farm west of Grand Island that was owned by Norden Laboratories, a veterinary pharmaceutical company, and managed by his father. Three thousand pigs were raised on the farm each year for the production of the company’s hog cholera and erysipelas vaccination products.